Aspects of polychaete ecology with particular reference to commensalism

Abstract

In his monograph of the Polychaeta in the Fauna of India series, Fauvel (1953) records about 450 species that are to be found in the waters around India but he believed that this number represented only about one-half of the total. Day’s recent work (Day 1967) dealing with the polychaete fauna of Southern Africa has listed about 750 species from this region. It seems probable that a similarly large number of polychaete species will be recorded eventually from the central West Pacific region since a large proportion of the species recorded from Southern Africa and around India are known to be distributed throughout the Indo-West Pacific area, extending from the Red Sea to Japan and Eastern Australia. In many of these species a circumtropical distribution is apparent. In view of the fact that the polychaete fauna of the central West Pacific region is still very incompletely known, the Royal Society Expedition to the Solomon Islands in 1965 offered a unique opportunity for obtaining material from this area. The bulk of the material collected by the author comes from the littoral zone of the coral reefs as well as from the sediments of the more sheltered shores. However, in conjunction with Dr D. R. Stoddart’s physiographic survey of the Marovo Lagoon complex in the eastern part of New Georgia, the author carried out a dredging survey, comprising about 40 stations in depths of less than 35 m, and many interesting shallow-water invertebrates were obtained.