342 
THE CORAL TRIANGLE: HEARST BIODIVERSITY EXPEDITION 
Length of the speeimens (in mm) is given as total length (TL), the distanee from the front of the 
rostrum to the end of the eaudal finfold. All other measurements are given as percentage of TL 
(Table 1). About 7-11% shrinkage was noted in the TL of four specimens that were measured 
before preservation. Some shrinkage occurs in all myxinid specimens upon preservation, mainly in 
the trunk length (McMillan and Wisner 1984). 
Counts of gill pouches and cusps were taken from both sides, whereas slime pore counts are 
from the left side. Details on the deepwater fishes collected during the Hearst Expedition are pro¬ 
vided by Iwamoto and McCosker (2014). Specimens examined are deposited in the fish collections 
of the California Academy of Sciences (CAS), National Museum of Natural History (USNM), and 
Niicleo cm Ecologia e Desenvolvimento Socioambiental, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro 
(NPM). 
Taxonomic History of Eptatretus luzonicus (= Eptatretus fernholmi) 
Eptatretus luzonicus has a convoluted and curious taxonomic history. The holotype was col¬ 
lected in 1909 during the Albatross Expedition to the Philippines and deposited at the USNM fish 
collection. Like many of the nearly 100,000 specimens collected during the expedition it was 
apparently shelved and remained unidentified for many decades {cf. Smith and Williams 1999). 
While at the USNM, on June 29, 1972, Carl Leavitt Hubbs of the Scripps Institution of Oceanog¬ 
raphy (SIO) examined the hagfish specimen collected by the Albatross Expedition and identified it 
as Myxine garmani Jordan and Snyder, 1901; it was catalogued as USNM 207761 on July 11,1972. 
It was then sent to Hubbs on loan at SIO and, after further examination, Hubbs thought that it was 
an undescribed species of Myxine but did not open the abdominal cavity to count its gill pouches 
(which would have allowed the proper generic identification). The specimen remained at SIO and 
was later examined by Bo Femholm of the Swedish Museum of Natural History during a six-month 
collaboration that he spent at SIO with Hubbs. At that time they realized that it was a new species 
of Eptatretus and they gave it the manuscript name ''Eptatretus luzoniea'\ They recognized that the 
specimen was in poor condition and were eager to get more and better material for its description. 
Fernholm went to the Philippines in an effort to get more specimens but he did not succeed, and 
they never published the new species (Bo Fernholm pers. comm., Febmary 17, 2012). 
Subsequently, Charmion McMillan and Robert Wisner worked in the Hubbs lab at SIO and 
assisted him with his hagfish studies. In 2004 they published a review of the hagfishes from the 
northwestern Pacific, in which they described three new species, Eptatretus fernholmi, Paramyx- 
ine moki, and Paramyxine walkeri (McMillan and Wisner 2004). They briefly described the Philip¬ 
pine specimen collected by the Albatross Expedition as Eptatretus fernholmi without examination 
of any specimen. Their description was based on a picture and unpublished notes by Bo Fernholm. 
They mentioned that Bo Femholm “. . . planned to describe it as a new species 'E. luzoniea' with 
Carl L. Hubbs, to whom he gave the data and photo, but apparently abandoned the idea when 
Hubbs died a few years later. The notes and photo came into our possession with other hagfish data 
when Hubbs’ lab was closed.” McMillan and Wisner (2004) also stated that “... the specimen was 
left in the National Museum of Natural History”, but the specimen was never returned to the 
USNM fish collection. In Febmary 2012, in response to a request by Michael Mincarone and Bo 
Fernholm, Philip Hastings and H. J. Walker were able to locate the specimen (Fig. 1) at SIO. 
Recently, Femholm et al. (2013) performed a phylogenetic analysis of the Myxinidae based on 
molecular data, which resulted in the synonymization of Paramyxine with Eptatretus. This created 
a homonymy of Paramyxine fernholmi Kuo, Huang, and Mok, 1994 (from Taiwan) with Eptatre¬ 
tus fernholmi McMillan and Wisner, 2004 (from the Philippines). As Eptatretus fernholmi became 
