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Cleavage and gastrulation in Pycnogonum litorale (Arthropoda, Pycnogonida): morphological support for the Ecdysozoa?

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Abstract

The early cleavage and gastrulation of the pycnogonid Pycnogonum litorale is investigated in detail by fluorescence microscopy, confocal laser scanning microscopy, and histology. The cleavage is holoblastic with equally sized blastomeres and an irregular radial pattern. There is no stereotypic cell lineage, and timing and spindle directions of individual mitoses vary to a high degree. Gastrulation begins at the 63-cell stage with the retardation and enlargement of a cell which adopts the form of a bottle and fills the interior of the egg, followed by immigration and epiboly of smaller cells surrounding the large bottle-shaped cell. The gastrulation site marks the dorsal side of the embryo and the stomodaeum forms adjacent to the area of gastrulation. The pattern of the early development of Pycnogonum is compared with that of other Pycnogonida resulting in a putative ground pattern of pycnogonid development. Furthermore, our results are discussed in the wider framework of putative arthropod and cycloneuralian relationships. This comparison implies morphological support for the Ecdysozoa.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Kathia Fabritius-Vilpoux for her valuable advice concerning the collection and maintenance of Pycnogonum litorale. We thank Georg Brenneis and Claudia Arango for many discussions concerning pycnogonid biology. Franz Krapp helped with some taxonomic advices and Jason Dunlop corrected the English. We would further like to thank Winfried Hochstetter, Arno Otten, Gunda Jochens and colleagues at the Aquarium Wilhelmshaven for supporting us during our field trips. We thank the skipper and the administrative staff at the Terramare Wilhelmshaven for technical support. The study is part of the priority program “Deep Metazoan Phylogeny” of the DFG (Scho 442/9-1).

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  1. Institut für Biologie/Vergleichende Zoologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Philippstr. 13, 10115, Berlin, Germany

    Petra Ungerer & Gerhard Scholtz

  2. School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Petra Ungerer

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  1. Petra Ungerer
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Correspondence to Gerhard Scholtz.

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Ungerer, P., Scholtz, G. Cleavage and gastrulation in Pycnogonum litorale (Arthropoda, Pycnogonida): morphological support for the Ecdysozoa?. Zoomorphology 128, 263–274 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00435-009-0091-y

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