Résultats des Campagnes MUSORSTOM, Volume 20 [Memoires du Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Volume 180]

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Language: Eight English and two French contributions, all with bilingual abstracts in English and French

Résultats des Campagnes MUSORSTOM is an ongoing series on the deep-sea fauna of the tropical Indo-Pacific. Initially focussed on the New Caledonia region, the series has now expanded to cover other South Pacific islands and island groups, in particular Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, Fiji and the Marquesas. MUSORSTOM, which rests on an international network of collaborating taxonomists, is the most ambitious ongoing program of deep-sea zoological exploration. The present volume (which is volume 180 in the parent series Mémoires du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle) contains contributions by eleven authors from Japan, New Zealand, the USA and Europe, and deals with deep-sea corals (one paper), bryozoans (one), isopod and decapod crustaceans (six), and snake eels (one). The results present new data on the morphology, systematics and distribution of more than 250 species. One new subfamily, five new genera and 60 new species are described. Of broader biological interest are the descriptions of new biological associations, e.g., between hermit crabs and Zoanthidea, and between acrothoracican cirripedes and corals. Carrier shells (Xenophora) were found to incorporate into their shells species of deep-sea corals that have otherwise never been collected by conventional means, which draws attention to the still inadequate sampling intensity of the tropical deep-sea benthos. The bryozoan genus Pseudothyracella, previously known as a Paleogene fossil in Europe and North America, is added to the list of "living fossils", being represented by a new, living species. The MUSORSTOM series is a joint program of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and the Institut Français de Recherche Scientifique pour le Développement en Coopération (ORSTOM).

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Biography

Alain Crosnier, who edits the report volumes, is a senior scientist emeritus with ORSTOM and has published many papers on the systematics of tropical shrimps and other crustaceans.