HOUTMAN’S ABROLHOS. 149 
commodity; supplies to the value of from £15,000 to £20,000 being annually 
exported thence to the Chinese market. From the tropical areas of the Western 
Australian coast-line, and more particularly from the neighbourhood of King’s Sound, 
a single entirely distinct, and, as compared with the choicer Queensland species, 
an inferior commercial variety of Béche-de-Mer, nearly allied to, if not identical 
with what is known in Queensland as “Surf-Red,” Actinopyga mauritiana, is collected 
for export. Neither has a diligent investigation, made with the express object of 
discovering the presence of other more valuable species, so far proved successful. 
It was consequently a most unexpected surprise to the writer, in the course 
of his explorations of the Pelsart Island reefs in Houtman’s Abrolhos, to meet with 
not only one, but no less than three of the most esteemed Torres Straits and North 
Queensland varieties. These several species are commercially known in the Queensland 
market as “ Black Fish,” “ Red Fish,” and “Teat Fish,” or, in the Chinese vernacular as 
“ Woo-Sum,” “ Hung-Hur” and ‘“See-Ok-Sum.” On spirit-preserved specimens of these 
varieties being submitted to the British Museum Echinoderm specialist, Professor 
Jeffry Bell, that authority decided that only one of these, the “ Red Fish,” Actinopyga 
obesa, had hitherto been associated with a scientific name, and the writer has 
accordingly portrayed and describe the remaining two, “ Black Fish” and “ Teat Fish,” 
in his treatise on the Great Barrier Reef, under the respective titles of Actinopyga 
polymorpha and Holothuria mammifera. 
The relatively short time available for the exploration of favourable Béche-de- 
Mer feeding grounds among the Abrolhos reefs revealed the presence of all of the 
three above-mentioned valuable commercial varieties in tolerable abundance, and there is 
little doubt that, in combination with the development of other fishery potentialities 
of the district, the systematic conservation and export of Abrolhos Béche-de-Mer 
would constitute a remunerative source of income. One other essentially North 
Australian representative of the Holothuride, though having no intrinsic commercial 
value, was observed by the writer at the Houtman’s Abrolhos. This was the Synapta 
Beselli, of Semper, a species first discovered by that naturalist in the Philippine 
Islands, and remarkable for its extraordinary length, no less than five or six feet when 
fully extended, and the nodulated, quadrangular contour of its transparent pink, or 
more or less mottled brown, integument. This species occurred in considerable 
abundance on the reefs in the neighbourhood of Warrior Island, Torres Straits, but, 
so far as the writer's investigations have extended, does not occur on the mainland 
coral reefs of Western Australia. 
