The genus Artemia Leach, 1819 (Crustacea: Branchiopoda). I. True and false taxonomical descriptions

The brine shrimp Artemia is important for aquaculture since it is bighly nutritious. It is also used widely in biological studies because it is easy to culture. The aim of the present study is to review the literature on the taxonomical nomenclature of Artemia. The present study indicates the existence of seven species: three living in the Americas, one in Europe, and three in Asia.

Taxonomists are still confused about the systematic and phylogenetic relationships of the Artemia species (Triantaphyllidis et al, 1997) and there are different opinions about its biosystematics. For example, there are two views for A. franciscana and A. monica. Artemia monica, from Mono Lake, cannot be crossed with A. franciscanabecause of the inability of the two species to tolérate the same water ionic composition (Mono Lake has a mix of Cl-, SO42- and CO3- ions). A. monica is therefore thought to be effectively debarred from exchanging gene withA. franciscana so these two species are known as two different "biological species" (Clark & Bowen, 1976). According to others (Abreu-Grobois & Beardmore, 1982; Triantaphyllidis et al, 1998), A. monica may be ecologically separated from A. franciscana, but the genetic distance between these two taxa is less than the distance between other Artemia taxa; therefore they can be described as sibling species. Furthermore, there are no taxonomic identification keys for the genus due to a lack of reliable morphological characters, so different methods have been used for species characterization. The most relevant methods are comparison of biometric characteristics, electro-phoretic patterns of different allozymes, cross-fertility tests and microscopic survey of the morphology such as frontal knob and gonopod (Abreu-Grobois & Beardmore, 1982; Mura, 1990; Hontoria & Amat, 1992; Triantaphyllidis et al, 1997; De los Ríos & Zúñiga, 2000; Torrentera & Belk, 2002; De los Ríos & Asem, 2008).

Seeing that Artemia was an economically important species this has led to a decline of basic studies on this taxon, with wide use of 'Artemia salina" as a trade ñame. There are numerous published data on biochemical, mutational, toxicological and others aspects of Artemia, all using the ñame Artemia salina for any population in this genus (Abreu-Grobois & Beardmore, 1982; Gajardo et al, 2002). As a result, the brine shrimp Artemia is used in many aquaculture studies and for experimental models but its basic taxonomy is not considered by many authors resulting in taxonomical confusión (Table 1), with the mistakes and respective corrections about systematic nomenclature.

Dr. D. Christopher Rogers (EcoAnalysts Inc, California, U.S.A.) is thanked for the scientific comments and English text.

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