Stomatolina danblumi Singer & Mienis 1999

Stomatolina aff. danblumi Singer & Mienis, 1999 —new record

(Figure 8 J–L)

Stomatolina danblumi Singer & Mienis, 1999: 43. Verbinnen & Dirkx, 2005: 25, fig. 4. Type loc.: Red Sea, Gulf of Aqaba, 11 km north of Dahab, in ‘Blue Hole’; holotype in HUJ (40620).

Pseudostomatella (Stomatolina) danblumi — Singer & Mienis, 1999: figs 1–4, 5d–g.

Distribution. Mozambique Channel (Bassas da India) and Northern Zululand (Kosi Bay to Sodwana Bay); beachdrift to 20 m (living 8–18 m).

Notes. This material is not referable to Stomatolina danblumi, but bears some resemblance to it, particularly in terms of the fine shell sculpture and the colour pattern. S. danblumi has a more depressed shell, shouldered spire whorls and lacks an umbilicus. There is also some resemblance to S. crenulata (Preston, 1908) from the Andaman Islands, particularly with regard to the undulating periphery of the spire whorls, but that species has stronger, more uneven spiral sculpture and is also anomphalous.

When describing this species, Singer & Mienis (1999) referred it to the genus Stomatolina, but treated this as a subgenus of Pseudostomatella Thiele, 1924 in their figure legends, exemplifying the confusion surrounding supraspecific taxa in this subfamily. The relatively finely sculptured shell is indeed more similar to that of Pseudostomatella species than it is to the majority of Stomatolina species and the present material stands out as being conspicuously smoother than the other South African species. However, it is much less auriform that typical Pseudostomatella species, retains an umbilicus and there is no thickened peri-umbilical band.