Kulikovskiyia gen. nov. (Bacillariophyceae) from the lateritic rock pools of the Western Ghats, India and from Hainan Province, China

Abstract

A new triundulate naviculoid diatom genus is described from the Western Ghats of Peninsular India and Hainan Province, China. The new taxon, Kulikovskiyia gen. nov. has robust conical spines along its margin and at the apices and the external valve face has longitudinally‐oriented siliceous slat system extending the length of the valve. The external distal raphe ends bifurcate and terminates on the valve face. There appear to be superficial similarities between this Asian genus and species and Playaensis, a genus comprised of two species found only in the western USA. The systematic position of Kulikovskiyia is discussed, and other than noting its similarities to other biraphid naviculoid diatoms due to symmetry features and the position of the raphe, we are uncertain about its systematic placement at finer levels of classification.

A new freshwater Gomphonema Ehrenberg (Bacillariophyta) species from Eastern Himalayas, India

“…It seems likely that this feature of asymmetry about both the apical and transapical axes in members of the Cymbellales has been achieved independently many times, rather than a feature that is diagnostic for a natural group of taxa. Recently many novel taxa representing multiple lineages of diatoms were described from Asia, in particular, tropical Asia (Glushchenko et al 2019a, b;Thacker et al 2019;Liu et al 2019;Roy et al 2019;Kulikovskiy et al 2020). These discoveries confirm that Asia is the hotspot of diatom diversification as proposed by Kociolek (2019) and the same finding need to be strengthened using molecular phylogenetic tools.…”