Introduction 



The title of this work will no doubt raise several questions in many readers' 

 minds: why the Caribbean? why not the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico? 

 why only the marine isopods? just what is the "Caribbean area"? We hope 

 that the answers to some of these (and other) questions will become 

 apparent. 



There are several works that already deal with the isopods of the Carib- 

 bean, as part of a wider treatment of North American isopods (e.g., 

 Richardson, 1905; Schultz, 1969). Why then this "Isopods of the Carib- 

 bean"? As partial answer, the following: many new records of isopods from 

 the Caribbean region (in its broadest sense) have appeared in scattered pub- 

 lications in the last few decades. The time has come to pull these together in a 

 single work. The number of marine laboratories in the area has increased, 

 with more and more students exploring especially the shallow marine en- 

 vironment. A single work on a relatively speciose and abundant group of 

 invertebrates would be useful to such investigators, as they build up a com- 

 prehensive view of the biology of the region. Concepts of the taxonomy of 

 several isopod groups have changed radically over the last few years; again, 

 there is obvious utility in having these changes summarized in a single 

 source. New species and records are continuously being found. Having a 

 single baseline work decreases the time needed for investigating and estab- 

 lishing the validity of such records. 



HISTORIC BACKGROUND 



The history of isopod taxonomic research in the Caribbean really starts with 

 a worldwide monographic work on the Cirolanidae by Hansen in 1890. In- 

 cluded here were about 12 species from the Danish West Indies, now the 

 U.S. Virgin Islands. Since then a few major works on Caribbean isopods 

 have appeared, such as Moore's report on the isopods of Puerto Rico (1901) 

 and Menzies and Glynn's report on the same area (1968). Some areas have 

 received considerable attention, such as the aforementioned Puerto Rico and, 

 more recently, Belize. A list of 116 species of isopods from Cuba (including 

 Oniscidea) has been published (Ortiz, Lalana, and Gomez, 1987). At the 

 other extreme, there are no records from a number of localities, especially the 



