Description

Distribution: This species is only known from its type locality, situated at the southeastern corner of the Russian Far East. However, numerous occurrences from Northeastern China attributed to B. cf. weberi (Figure 1) may belong to the new species. Habitats and ecology: The holotype was collected from a pool site of a small river with clay bottom (Figure 6). This leech specimen was fixed with its prey, an oligochaete, protruding from its mouth. A COI sequence was generated from this worm (GenBank acc. No. OQ 933549). Searching with the BOLD IDS reveals that the COI sequence of the prey item is related to those of oligochaetes identified as Limnodrilus profundicola (Verrill, 1871) (Oligochaeta: Naididae). This finding indicates that Barbronia borealis sp. nov. feeds on small freshwater oligochaetes, as do some other species in this genus (Nesemann et al. 2007).

Common Names

Taxonomic Hierarchy

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Annelida

Class: Clitellata

Order: Euhirudinea

Family: Salifidae

Genus: Barbronia

Species: Barbronia borealis Bolotov, Eliseeva & Kondakov, 2023