Morphological characters of Gymnodinium brevisulcatum F.H. Chang sp. nov. are described from specimens collected during the 1998 summer toxic bloom in Wellington Harbour and cultures developed from the bloom. The new species, which dominated the early 1998 bloom, is very toxic and killed a large variety of micro- and macroalgae, invertebrates, and vertebrates in the harbor. Human respiratory distress was experienced from aerosols apparently originating from the bloom. Isolates of G. brevisulcatum were examined using both light and scanning electron microscopy. Gymnodinium brevisulcatum may be separated from G. mikimotoi Miyake et Kominami ex Oda (= G. nagasakiense) and other closely related species by several features: it has a very short apical groove on the ventral surface of the epicone; it is the smallest species within the Gymnodinium mikimotoi group; and the nucleus is either spherical and located in the left lobe of hypocone or at the division stage, it is horizontally elongated, extending left to right in the hypocone.
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F. Hoe Chang (1999) studied this question.