A new species of the Octocorallian genus Paragorgia trawled in Florida waters by R.V. "Gerda"

The genus Paragorgia was established by Milne Edwards & Haime in 1857 to receive the large, boreal scleraxonian octocoral from the "Norwegian Ocean", called Alcyonium arboreum by Linnaeus (1758). In subsequent years, that species was reported also from localities in the northern Pacific Ocean (Kinoshita, 1913; Hickson, 1915) and from high southern latitudes off the Falkland Islands (Broch, 1957). In 1883, Koren & Danielssen described two new species from Batalden, Norway, Paragorgia nodosa and Briareum frielei, which generally have been treated as synonyms of P. arborea. Nutting (1908, 1912), however, reported P. nodosa from deep waters off Hawaii and Japan and, furthermore, established a new Japanese species, Paragorgia regalis. Kinoshita (1913) also reported P. nodosa from Japan and proposed two more new species from that area, P. granulosa and P. tenuis. The first record of the genus Paragorgia from tropical waters was established by Thomson & Henderson (1906) for specimens which they called Paragorgia splendens, collected in the Indian Ocean by the "Investigator". Nutting (1911) and Stiasny (1937) reported the same species, probably in error, from deep water off the Sulu Islands. In 1956, I suggested that Nutting's (1908) record of P. nodosa from Hawaii was incorrect and established his material as a new species, P. dendroides. Although it is definitely not the same as P. nodosa from Norwegian waters, I now am inclined to believe that P. dendroides belongs to the species that Nutting called P. regalis from Japan. Since Paragorgia arborea and related forms have been collected repeatedly in cold, northern waters, but only a few records of the genus are known