Family Actinolaimidae

Revised 06/16/23

•  Anterior part of the stoma, the cheilostom, is heavily sclerotized and generally has four, but sometimes six, large onchia pointing forward and surrounding the odontostyle (Vinciguerra, 1987).
• The stylet can be stout or slender.
• The walls of the mouth cavity in some genera bear denticles.
• The cuticle is smooth or longitudinally striated.
• The esophagus is muscular throughout its length or only in the enlarged posterior part.
• The male tail is long and filiform as in the female, or shaped differently to that in the female.
• The male preanal papillae are in a regular ventral series or grouped in fascicles.

Three subfamilies were recognized by Vinciguerra (1988)::

Actinolaiminae: genera with four onchia

Hexactinolaiminae with 6 onchia

Trachypleurosinae: lacking onchia, represented by the genuis Trachypleurosum. However, later, the standard four onchia of the family were found to be present and the subfamily was eliminated.  Similarly, a subfamily Hextaactinolaiminae based on nematodes with 6 onchia was eliminated when it was found the only member, Hexactinolaimus aneityi, actually had four onchia and was moved to the genus Paractinolaimus as Paractinolaimus proximus. Consequently, the subfamily Actinolaiminae was also eliminated because it was considered a redundancy of the family name (Vinciguerra and Coomans, 1991)

The subfamily Brittonematinae proposed by Thorne, 1967 was still recognized by Andrassy (2010) and may (or may not) still exist.

Ref: Vincigierra, 1991, Andrassy, 2010

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References:

Andrassy, I. 2010. Two new nematode species of the subfamily Brittonematinae (Dorylaimida: Actinolaimidae). Opusc. Zool. Budapest, 2010, 41(2): 175–190

Thorne, G. 1939. A monograph of the nematodes of the superfamily Dorylaimoidea. Capita Zool. 8: 1-263.

Vinciguerra, M.T. 1988. A new classification of Actinolaimoidea Thorne, 1939 using a cladistic approach. Nematologica 33:251-277.

Vinciguerra, M.T. 1991. Cladistic analysis and a comparison between taxonomical criteria in the classification of nematodes. Italian Journal of Zoology 58:337-343.

Vinciguerra, M.T and Coomans, A. 1991. Hexactinolaimus Yeates, 1973, a junior synonym of Paractinolaimus (Meyl, 1957. and a revised clasification of Actinolaimidae (Nematoda: Dorylaimida)  Revue Nematol. 14:589-596.

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