Maja goltziana d'Oliveira, 1888 (Decapoda, Brachyura, Majidae) in the southern Tyrrhenian Sea

Maja goltziana d'Oliveira, 1888 is an oxyrhynch crab occurring in the eastern Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Congo and the Canary Islands, and in the Mediterranean Sea (d'Udekem d'Acoz, 1999). It is apparently uncommon all across its distributional range, although González Pérez (1995) describes it as a frequent species on the Canary Islands. In the Mediterranean, it is by far the least common of the Maja species, among which it can easily be distinguished by the morphological characteristics of the dorsal part of the carapace and of the walking legs (see Pastore, 1983) (fig. 1). It was first recorded from the Mediterranean off the coast of Israel in the late 1950's (Holthuis & Gottlieb, 1958). In the following twenty or more years it was sparsely recorded from the Levantine basin and the Aegean Sea by only a few specimens (Ramadan & Dowidar, 1972; Koukouras, 1979; Kocatas, 1981). Later on, M. goltziana was collected in the Ionian Sea (Pastore, 1983), the Strait of Sicily (Pipitone & Tumbiolo, 1993), and the Aegean Sea (d'Udekem d'Acoz, 1994). In fact, d'Udekem d'Acoz (1999) was doubtful about the presence of this species in the Adriatic Sea, based on the record of Maja erinacea Ninni, 1924 reported by ?tev?ci´c (1990). More recently, two new records have extended the known geographic range of M. goltziana to the western Mediterranean, notably to the southern (Rinelli et al., 2000) and the northern (Vignoli et al., 2004) Tyrrhenian Sea. The present paper reports about two findings of M. goltziana in the southern Tyrrhenian, and confirms its established presence in the western Mediterranean Sea.