| dc.description.abstract | The soft coral family Nephtheidae is known for being the most difficult to classify of all the Alcyonacea families. The confusion in the terminology and the lack of consistent de-tailed descriptions and use of figures contribute to the challenging work in identification.Northern expeditions and more recently projects like MAREANO, BIOICE and BIO-FAR have resulted in a substantial collection of northern Nephtheidae corals. These collections are found in the Department of Natural History, University Museum of Bergen,in the Icelandic Natural History Museum (INHM) and Natural History Museum of Den-mark in Copenhagen.Material of northern Nephtheids was thoroughly studied in the 1940’s and a substantial confusion in the nomenclature was revealed by J. F. Madsen in 1944. In addition,the morphological description was sparse. Little has been done since to sort out this confusion, and to see if it is possible to provide a comprehensive morphological description of the northern Nephtheidae species.The geographical distribution and their variability of temperature and depth as habitat factors has been investigated, by comparing the values (temperature and depth) at the observed location of the different taxa. An extensive assembly of previous morphological descriptions provided a guide of diagnostic characters to use in species identification.A comprehensive morphological description were conducted and included the characters that are traditionally used (e.g. sclerite shape) and were supplemented with detailed photo-documentation of characters that previously only have been described. A phylogenetic analysis was created using Maximum likelihood to see if the categorization of the different species were supported, and to investigate their phylogenetic relationship.The habitat analysis showed a difference in temperature gradient per taxa, while the depth gradients had more overlap between the taxa. By collecting all the morphological descriptions from the literature, it proved possible to connect species identification to the nine different morphology types that arose during this study. The species that were identified are the non-retractile Duva florida (Rathke, 1806), Duvacf.multiflora (Verrill,1879), Drifa glomerata (Verrill, 1869), Pseudodrifa racemosa (Studer, 1891), Pseudodrifagroenlandica (Molander, 1915) and the retractile Gersemia rubiformis (Ehrenberg, 1834) and Gersemia mirabilis (Danielssen, 1887). The phylogenetic analysis gave support to two monophyletic clades; the non-retractile (Clade I) and the retractile (clade II) Nephtheidae, and revealed a pattern that up to a point supports the division of the morphology types tested | en_US |
