484 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1956 



waters too deep to serve as a shallow-water passageway for littoral 

 forms. Are the Palaus now so isolated that special endemic species, 

 found nowhere else, have evolved from their East Indian ancestors? 

 How do the reefs, the habitat of most tropical shallow-water animals, 

 as we see them in Palau, differ from those elsewhere in Micronesia, 

 and from those in the East Indies ? Such were the questions we hoped 

 to answer when we, as part of a 4-man team, set out for the Palau 

 Islands late in June 1955. 



PROJECT CORAL FISH 



Together, we formed Project Coral Fish, a continuing field program 

 devoted to the study of the marine biology of the high islands and 

 atolls in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. This program was 

 initiated in 1954 by the George Vanderbilt Foundation at Stanford 

 University, with the cooperation and support of the Pacific Science 

 Board (National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council), 

 the Office of Naval Research, the United States Department of the 

 Navy, the United States Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, and 

 the Smithsonian Institution. Aside from the present writers, the team 

 included H. Adair Fehlmann, assistant curator of the George Vander- 

 bilt Foundation collections at Stanford University, and Sterling H. 

 Pierce, technical assistant. We hoped to gather data and specimens 

 of all kinds to give us an approximate answer to the question : What 

 lives in the waters of Palau ? With this basic information we would 

 be in a better position to answer such practical questions as: What 

 kind of marine life can be exploited for food ? How can their supply 

 be conserved? What other marine products of economic importance 

 could the Palauan people develop successfully ? What are the dangers 

 in fishing the reefs, and how can they be avoided ? 



As a byproduct of our basic task of finding out what animals popu- 

 late the reefs of Palau, we studied the communities living in various 

 kinds of habitats, especially in Iwayama Bay, and the strange associa- 

 tions that develop between different kinds of animals. 



After many months of preparation, during which supplies and 

 equipment were assembled and shipped to the western Pacific, the four 

 team members assembled on June 22, 1955, at the George Vanderbilt 

 Foundation headquarters on the Stanford University campus, and 

 final plans for the trip to Palau were made. Under orders from the 

 Chief of Naval Operations, the following day we left Moffett Field, 

 Calif., aboard a military transport plane bound for Guam. 



Two days and more than 6,000 miles later, we arrived in Guam, 

 where we learned that the expedition equipment had all been for- 

 warded to the Palaus on schedule. D. H. Nucker, the Acting High 

 Commissioner of the U. S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, with 





