Records of Indo-Pacific Echinoderms 
Austin H. Clark^ 
The echinoderms recorded herein were for 
the most part collected in connection with 
the studies of the Pacific Science Board, Na- 
tional Research Council. They represent in- 
cidental activities of 15 members of survey 
parties, all of whom were intensively engaged 
in other work. It has seemed advisable to sup- 
plement these records with those of other 
specimens from the Indo-Pacific region not 
previously recorded which were received from 
15 donors, most of whom were members of 
the armed forces, chiefly during and after the 
war. The specimens from New Caledonia were 
presented to the National Museum by the 
late Lieutenant General Alexander McCarrell 
Patch, Jr., through the National Geographic 
Society. 
All the specimens listed are in the United 
States National Museum. A large collection 
of echinoderms from the Marshall Islands, 
including 2,674 specimens resulting from the 
Navy’s Operation Crossroads and the Bikini 
Scientific Resurvey, has previously been de- 
scribed (Clark, 1952). This paper should be 
consulted in connection with the present 
contribution. 
All the sea urchins collected by Dr. F. S. 
MacNeil are dead tests. 
Our knowledge of the details of the dis- 
tribution of the littoral echinoderms of the 
^ Curator, Division of Echinoderms, United States 
National Museum, Washington, D.C. Manuscript re- 
ceived August 12, 1953. 
Indo-Pacific is very limited, especially in re- 
gard to the central Pacific area. Extensive 
work has been done only in Australia, the 
Netherlands East Indies, the Malayan region, 
the Philippines, and the Hawaiian Islands, 
and even here the records, though very nu- 
merous, are very spotty. 
About the large, high, forested islands 
where the available nutrients in the sea are 
enriched by a constant accession of vegetable 
waste from the land, the fauna, both littoral 
and abyssal, is exceedingly rich and varied, 
with many large species and unusually large 
individuals of other species. A curious side 
light on the importance of vegetable detritus 
is afforded by the flexible-shelled sea urchins 
of the genus Araeosoma which occur at depths 
of from 70 to 1,289 meters and are known to 
feed on the leaves of dicotyledonous plants. 
Even a fossil Araeosoma from California was 
surrounded by leaf impressions. In the Pacific 
area Araeosoma occurs among the Malayan 
Islands and the Philippines, off Tonga and 
Fiji, off southern Japan, and off the Galapagos 
Islands and Panama, but not in the central 
Pacific or on the American coast except at 
Panama. The species of Araeosoma are large, 
one of them up to 180 millimeters in diameter. 
Although certain faunal subregions may be 
distinguished in the region of the larger and 
higher islands from Ceylon eastward, these 
are not very distinctive, the tropical Austra- 
lian, including the Aru Islands and the south 
243 
