Saravanane Narayanane

• Master of Science
• Researcher at Centre For Marine Living Resources and Ecology

A new species of deep-sea thyasirid (Bivalvia: Thyasiridae), Ascetoaxinus ravichandrani sp. nov., is described and illustrated from material collected in the northern Indian Ocean during the FORV Sagar Sampada deep-sea cruise no. 404. Specimens were collected from a depth between 1007 m and 1038 m off Kanyakumari, Gulf of Mannar, Tamil Nadu, South...

Over the years as a part of many fishery surveys, considerable number of stomiiform fishes were collected by the Centre for Marine Living Resources and Ecology (CMLRE) Research Vessel ‘Sagar Sampada’. The collection came from throughout the Indian EEZ and some from the western Indian Ocean. However, a systematic identification of these fishes had n...

Sipuncula is one of the most taxonomically neglected groups of marine invertebrates in Indian waters. Research on these worms has been stagnant for the last three decades as there are no sipunculan taxonomists in India. The current work is an attempt to resurrect taxonomic research on Indian Sipuncula fauna by describing the first new Sipuncula spe...

The current study presents the first molecular data of three species of the family Phyllidiidae, Phyllidia ocellata, Phyllidia alyta and Phyllidiella rosans, from Indian waters. The P. ocellata molecular sequences closely match those available from the Pacific Ocean, whereas P. alyta and P. rosans form independent clades, confirming their identific...

The number of rays in pectoral and pelvic fins are the major diagnostic character for species discrimination in the genus Bathophilus . However, all of the five species of Bathophilus we studied showed considerable differences from the existing counts in the number of rays in pectoral and pelvic fins, which has made species identification and inter...

A better understanding of the mechanism which connects the morphology of fishes and their ecological performance is a major goal in evolutionary studies. As accepted widely, intra-species polymorphism mostly arises from divergent selection pressures between different environments. The present study sought to understand the functional morphological...

Morphology of the fish and otoliths are popularly used in the discrimination of species/stocks/populations and also to gather meaningful conclusions about their ecology. This approach is useful to enhance our understanding of the relationship between form and function in fishes when a direct assessment is impossible. Inter-species variation was ana...

The coastal marine environments in the Indian Exclusive Economic Zone harbour a rich diversity of mantis shrimps. However, several regions have not been adequately surveyed for their stomatopod faunal composition. In this paper, we report the first records of two species, Gonodactylopsis drepanophora (de Man, 1902) and Cloridina malaccensis (Mannin...

The Lakshadweep archipelago constitutes a major coral region of India but still lacks sufficient biodiversity data owing to its remoteness and a low number of faunal studies in the past. The present paper describes two new Pseudoceros species collected from Agatti Island, Lakshadweep, India. Pseudoceros bipurpurea sp. nov. and Pseudoceros galaxea s...

The water bodies along a continuum from estuaries to open ocean display significant changes in their physical, chemical and biological characteristics. In the current study, we report the influence of such changes on the abundance and community structure of bacteria and archaea in a continuum from Cochin Estuary, in the southwest coast of India, to...

The present paper discusses the new occurrence report and taxonomic note of a deep-sea anglerfish Halieutaea indica Annandale and Jenkins, 1910 collected by Fishery Oceanographic Research Vessel Sagar Sampada from the Southeastern Arabian Sea at a depth ranging from 200-300 m. This species was originally described by Annandale and Jenkins in 1910 f...

The paper presents three new records of brittle stars for Indian waters, collected from the Lakshadweep atolls (northern Indian Ocean)-Ophiarachnella septemspinosa (Müller & Troschel, 1842), Ophiocoma cynthiae Benavides-Serrato & O'Hara, 2008 & Ophiomoeris obstricta (Lyman, 1878). Further, this paper also discusses the validity of two recently desc...

The Andaman Sea adjoining the Indian Territory is biologically rich in terms of marine diversity. However, inadequate surveys during the post-independence era have resulted in large lacunae in data on the species composition in these waters. In this paper, we report the first observation of two species of dendrobranchiate prawns, Metapenaeopsis dif...

The Lakshadweep Islands are one of the major coral ecosystems of India, along with the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are known to harbour exceptionally high marine biodiversity. The paper presents results of preliminary surveys undertaken to document echinoderm diversity of the Agatti Atoll, which is situated along the western side of the Laks...

The presence of the deep-water flathead, Bembradium magnoculum Kishimoto, Kawai, Tashiro et Aungtonya, 2019, from the north-eastern Indian Ocean is reported for the first time. The species was previously known only from a single specimen collected off Phuket, Thailand, eastern Andaman Sea. One specimen measuring 101 mm SL was collected by the Fishe...

We examined the diversity of Planctomycetes in the sediment sample collected from an oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) in the southeast Arabian Sea. A 16SrRNA gene library was constructed using the forward primer specific for Planctomycetes and a universal reverse primer. The 237 sequences obtained were grouped into 130 operational taxonomic units, and the...