PROCEEDINGS OF THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



Issued |^5fv)A.0?M" ^y ^ 



SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM 



Vol. 105 Washington: 1955 No. 3352 



SOME POLYCLAD FLATWORMS FROM POLYNESIA 

 AND MICRONESIA 



By LiBBiE H. Hyman 



The Indo-Pacific area is commonly stated to be the richest in 

 marine littoral invertebrates of any place on the globe and no doubt 

 the Turbellaria share in this exuberance, but little has been done on 

 Indo-Pacific members of this group except in the order Polycladida 

 and even this group has been collected only sporadically. Most 

 of the descriptions of Indo-Pacific polyclads are old and inadequate, 

 so subsequent recognition is difficult if not impossible unless the 

 origmal specimens can be recovered, and some collections from the 

 area, as those of the Sihoga and of Semper in the Philippines (men- 

 tioned by Stummer-Traunfels, 1933), have never been described in 

 print, although Stummer-Traunfels published colored figures of some 

 of the species. 



The present study concerns a small collection of polyclads from 

 tropical islands of the central and western Pacific sent for deter- 

 mination by the U. S. National Museum. As I have recently pub- 

 lished a glossary of terms and full definitions of subordinal, familial, 

 and generic categories (Hyman, 1953), it appeai-s unnecessary to 

 repeat these definitions here. Definitions will be given onl}'- for 

 categories not appearing in that publication. 



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