Adineta grandis Murray 1910

Adineta cf. grandis Murray, 1910

(Fig. 3A)

Adineta grandis Murray, 1910: 51 – Dartnall & Hollowday 1985: 33, Donner 1965: 273, Kutikova 2005: 275, Iakovenko et al. 2015: 20

Notes. The following traits of A. grandis we considered as specific for the species: (1) vivacity and (2) very large sizes of the body (up to 500 µm and even higher) and trophi (up to 30 µm). Hundreds of such individuals (up to approximately 800 per 100 mg of substrate) that had other features of A. grandis i.e. colored in orange, reddish or brownish, relatively short foot, rostrum lamella divided in two lobes (Fig. 3A1–4) were found in dry organic sediments. It is worth noting that the obtained body measurements for A. grandis strongly coincide with data from a completely different location of Antarctica – Cape Royds (type locality) and Antarctic Peninsula. Absolutely all ratio indices were within the range indicated for A. grandis from other regions (Table 2). All this supports the unambiguity of this identification; still the cryptic species A. fontanetoi Iakovenko et al., 2015 should not be excluded. This species has the same external morphology as A. grandis and the differences may be found only at the molecular level or in slightly larger sizes of trophi. In this way, we have no choice except to consider this species as A. cf. grandis.