Deepstaria enigmatica Russell, 1967

Distribution

See Fig. 4, Mendoza-Becerril et al. (2025).

Notes

This species was reported from the Mexican Caribbean by Phillips (1972), based on a single damaged female specimen with a bell diameter of more than 70 cm. The depth at which the specimen was collected could not be determined with certainty, as the sampling device fished from the surface to approximately 2400 m without the use of a closing mechanism (Phillips 1972). At present, two valid species are recognised within the genus: Deepstaria enigmatica, originally described from San Diego in the Pacific Ocean and D. reticulum Larson, Madin & Harbison, 1988 from Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean. At the time of Phillips’s report, D. reticulum had not yet been described. Deepstaria enigmatica has been recorded far from its type locality, including deep-sea observations from the mid-North Atlantic obtained using ROVs (Gruber et al. 2018), but the Mexican Caribbean record lies closer to the type locality of D. reticulum, suggesting that the specimen observed by Phillips may actually belong to that species. However, geographic proximity alone is insufficient for re-assignment in the absence of diagnostic morphological evidence. Given the absence of voucher material, the uncertainty regarding collection depth and the lack of diagnostic morphological information available for re-examination, the identification cannot be re-assessed with confidence. We, therefore, retain the original identification as D. enigmatica, while explicitly acknowledging that this record should be regarded as provisional.