Pontopolycope orientalis sp. nov. (Crustacea: Ostracoda: Polycopidae), the First Report of a Living Species of the Genus from the Indo-Pacific Region.

The present study describes Pontopolycope orientalis sp. nov. (Polycopidae), which was collected from the shallow sandy bottom off of Nagannu Island, Okinawa Prefecture, southwestern Japan. This new species is the first living representative of Pontopolycope from the Indo-Pacific region. We also provided a key to identifying five living congeners throughout the world's oceans. Since Pontopolycope is defined by the morphological characteristics of the carapace, the following five fossil and subfossil (empty valve) species of Polycope (Polycopidae) are moved to Pontopolycope: Pontopolycope luxuriosa (Herrig, 1964) comb. nov., P. sanctacatherinae (Whatley and Downing, 1983) comb. nov., P. krauseae (Herrig, 1994) comb. nov., P. proboscidea (Herrig, 1994) comb. nov., and P. isolata (Whatley, Jones and Wouters, 2000) comb. nov. Finally, the nucleotide sequence data of three genes (18S rRNA, 28S rRNA, and mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1) of the new species are provided for future systematic and phylogenetic studies.