No, it is not. H. magnipapillata was first described by Takeo Ito (Ito, 1947) from specimens he collected in 1943 and 1944 from multiple locations in Japan. One wonders why he was wandering around Japan looking for Hydra in the middle of World War II. Phylogenetic studies (Martínez et al., 2010) have since shown that H. magnipapillata is a member of the Eurasian Vulgaris clade and thus it has been renamed Hydra vulgaris. The Hydra genome paper (Chapman et al., 2010) used the species name H. magnipapillata and the GenBank entry for the genome assembly initially also used H. magnipapillata. Eventually, the GenBank entry was changed to Hydra vulgaris. The best way to avoid confusion is to refer to the species as Hydra vulgaris (formerly Hydra magnipapillata).

REFERENCES

Chapman, J.A., Kirkness, E.F., Simakov, O., Hampson, S.E., Mitros, T., Weinmaier, T., Rattei, T., Balasubramanian, P.G., Borman, J., Busam, D., et al. (2010). The dynamic genome of Hydra. Nature 464, 592-596.

Ito, T. (1947). A new fresh-water polyp, Hydra magnipapillata, n. sp. from Japan. Science Reports of the Tohoku University, Fourth Series (Biology) 18, 6-10.

Martínez, D.E., Iñiguez, A.R., Percell, K.M., Willner, J.B., Signorovitch, J., and Campbell, R.D. (2010). Phylogeny and biogeography of Hydra (Cnidaria: Hydridae) using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences. Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. 57, 403-410.