Boeckella palustris


Boeckella palustris is a species of copepod that lives in South America. It inhabits shallow pools, including the highest body of water ever to have yielded a crustacean, at an altitude of in the Andes. It was described independently by two scientists in 1955, using material brought back by different European expeditions to the same region.

Description

Males of B. palustris are long, and females. The antennules are relatively short. B. palustris can be distinguished from other members of the genus Boeckella by the form of the fifth leg in males.

Distribution and ecology

Boeckella palustris has a Páramo–Punan distribution, being found in southern Peru, and close to the border between Bolivia and Chile. It lives in "small, shallow bodies of water", a habitat it shares with Boeckella calcaris.
Boeckella palustris shares the record for the crustacean living at the highest altitude with the fairy shrimp Branchinecta brushi; both were found on December 13, 1988 in the same pool at an altitude of near the summit of the stratovolcano Cerro Paniri in the Antofagasta Region of Chile. The only higher record, which claimed that Branchinecta paludosa occurred at is "almost certainly a typographical error".

Taxonomy

Boeckella palustris was originally described as Pseudoboeckella palustris by John Philip Harding in 1955, using material gathered by the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to Lake Titicaca in 1937. The genus Pseudoboeckella was subsumed into Boeckella in 1992 by Ian A. E. Bayly of Monash University, Australia, as no reliable character could be found to distinguish the two. The species was independently described as Pseudoboeckella peruviensis in 1955 by Heinz Löffler using material from a 1953–1954 expedition to the Andes under Hans Kinzl, but Harding's description has priority, having been published on July 29, 1955, eleven weeks before Löffler's paper was read, on October 13, 1955.
The species epithet palustris is Latin for "of the marsh" and indicates its common habitat.