Nectonema is a genus of marine horsehair worms first described by Addison E. Verrill in 1879. It is the only genus in the family Nectonematidae described by Henry B. Ward in 1892, in the order Nectonematoidea, and in the class Nectonematoida. The genus contains five species; all species have a parasitic larval stage inhabiting crustacean hosts and a free-living adult stage that swims in open water.
GENUS
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Nectonema is a genus of marine horsehair worms first described by Addison E. Verrill in 1879. It is the only genus in the family Nectonematidae described by Henry B. Ward in 1892, in the order Nectonematoidea, and in the class Nectonematoida. The genus contains five species; all species have a parasitic larval stage inhabiting crustacean hosts and a free-living adult stage that swims in open water.
==Taxonomy== Nectonematoidea is one of two orders within the phylum Nematomorpha, the other being Gordioidea. The latter is likewise in a single class Gordioida, which is a significantly larger taxon, with over 300 known species. Nematomorpha are known as horsehair worms or Gordian worms, and form a sister-group to the nematodes. The following classification shows the place of Nectonematoida within the protostomes according to Minelli (2008) and Tedersoo (2017):
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).