Sea Anemones (Cnidaria: Actiniaria and Corallimorpharia) from Panama

Abstract

The Pacific and Caribbean coasts of the Republic of Panama are 1,700 km and 1,287 km long, respectively, and the islands, islets, and cays that lie over the continental shelf are home to a rich marine biodiversity. The sea anemones (the common name for cnidarians belonging to the orders Actiniaria and Corallimorpharia) from the coasts of Panama have been poorly studied, and most records date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Fautin 2008). The first records of sea anemones from the Pacific coast were made by Verrill (1869, 1870). He described 11 species of actiniarians, all of them recorded from the Gulf of Panama (mainly in Panama Bay). McMurrich (1893) added a record for Paractis lineolata valid name Antiparactis lineolatus (Couthouy in Dana, 1846) from the Gulf of Panama. Other authors have named other species with distributions along the Pacific coast of Panama e.g. Torrey (1906) for Anthopleura xanthogrammica (Brandt, 1835).