PART I—ANNOTATED LIST.’ 
CRINOIDEA. FEATHER-STARS. 
Although conditions are not suitable for the occurrence of stalked crinoids, 
the reefs of Torres Strait provide many a satisfactory home for comatulids and at 
certain points, such as the southwest reef at Mer, these exquisite animals are very 
abundant. Their remarkable delicacy and grace combined with their varied and 
often brilliant colors make them conspicuous even among the beauties of the reef, 
so that they are sure to attract the attention of anyone so fortunate as to visit 
such an area. At Mer we found no fewer than 21 species, and at Friday Island 
we secured a single specimen of still another. Of these 22 species, 7 seem to have 
been new to science when we took them,? and 7 others were not previously known 
from the Torres Strait region. In 1874 the Challenger had taken 9 species, and 
seven years later Dr. Coppinger, of the Alert, secured 4 of these, adding 9 more 
not taken by the earlier naturalists. Semon, in 1892, collected only 7 species at and 
near Thursday Island, adding none to the list of 18 already taken. Of these 18, 
we took but 8, so that the total number of species now known from TorresStrait is 32. 
The most common and the most beautiful of the Torres Strait comatulids 
are members of the family Comasteridz. They live a very sedentary life, either 
in crannies among the living corals or attached to the lower surface of large rock- 
fragments. Observations on their habits? show that they are very sluggish with 
little tendency to move about or even to change position. Movement, when it 
does occur, is effected by creeping, using the arms and not the cirri for this purpose. 
Comatulids of other families swim actively and very gracefully, but the comasterids 
apparently never do so under normal conditions. Their color diversity is very 
great and, in some cases at least, is entirely unreliable as a clue to the species. No 
correlation was noted between the brilliancy of the color and the light or shade of 
the habitat, but some evidence was found for believing that colors become deeper 
with age and, in some species at least, old individuals tend to become a deeper 
and deeper brown, or even black. 
Until 1907 the great Challenger monograph by P. H. Carpenter contained most 
of what was known about comatulids, although one or two other Englishmen and 
several German writers had made some contributions to the subject. But since 
1907 our knowledge has been enormously extended and the taxonomy of the group 
has been revolutionized by the work of Mr. Austin Hobart Clark, of the United 
States National Museum. The unusually keen systematic sense, excellent powers 
of observation, and remarkably clear use of language in description revealed in 
his publications, have placed all students of echinoderms under great obligations 
to him and have made him easily our foremost authority on the Recent Crinoids. 
In my work on the comatulids of the Torres Strait region I have been under con- 
1 Families and genera are arranged with reference to 2 taxonomic sequence, but species are arranged alphabetic- 
ally except in the families Ophidiasteridz and Ophiocomide, where they follow the sequence of the artificial keys. 
* See The Comatulids of Torres Strait, pp. 97-125 of Pub. No. 212, Carnegie Inst. Wash., 1915. 
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