Inventory of invertebrates from the rocky intertidal shore at Montepio, Veracruz, Mexico

A list of the marine invertebrate species identified until now from the rocky intertidal shore at Montepio, Veracruz, is presented. The information was obtained from 10 years of collections made by the Coleccion Nacional de Crustaceos and additional records were compiled from published information. The species list includes the life form in relation to the substrate, epifauna or criptofauna, as well as its type of distribution considering the 2 main zoogeographic provinces recognized for the Gulf of Mexico: Carolinean and Caribbean; the species found only in the Gulf of Mexico are also noted. The list includes 195 species belonging to 9 groups of which Crustacea is the most diverse with 73 species, followed by Mollusca with 69 and Echinodermata with 18; the less diverse groups were Chelicerata with 2 species and Platyhelminthes and Sipuncula with 1 species each. Seventy-four species represent new locality records and 7 are new records for Veracruz. A total of 5 517 invertebrate species have been reported for the Mexican portion of the Gulf of Mexico, thus 3.5% of this total can be found in Montepio. More species were part of the epifauna (70%) than the criptofauna (30%) which is composed mainly by molluscs, polychaetes and sipunculids. A larger tropical affinity was observed in the obtained species composition; however, an important number of species are more subtropical or Carolinean (86) and 51 species occur only in the Gulf of Mexico.