36 
AUSTRALASIAN ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION. 
Ehlers gives some coloured pictures of this common Antarctic Polynoid, in his 
account of the National Antarctic Expedition, and of its varieties, in the report of the 
German South Polar Expedition, above referred to. 
In the “ Challenger ” report, McIntosh figures the head and the chsetse of 
the species and varieties as distinguished by him ; and Willey represents the general 
appearance of the animal and the characteristic tubercles on the elytra. 
For a full list of the synonmy and literature consult Ehlers (1913). 
The species is evidently extremely abundant in Commonwealth Bay, as 169 
individuals are included in the collection, obtained from depths varying from 2 to 400 
fathoms, and it probably lives along the shore also, as Ehlers has noted its abundance 
along shore at all seasons of the year at Kaiser Wilhelm II. Land. 
It is, as is well known, extraordinarily variable in colouration, and Ehlers has 
figured several of the more usual types. 
1 find large as well as small individuals in which the elytra are colourless, so 
that the worm has a greyish appearance, though the more typical colour is some tone 
of brown, usually a chestnut, with or without a purplish tinge. 
In some the elytra are uniformly tinted; in others the pigment is in definite 
patches, which are either small and scattered irregularly over the surface, or arranged 
in definite lines parallel to the long axis of the worm ; in still others the patches are 
so closely crowded together that they produce a nearly uniform darker tone. 
In most cases the “ areola,” that is the area above the attachment of the elytron 
to its elytropore, is without pigment. In some individuals a reddish-purple spot or 
even a violet spot lies behind this areola ; or, again, this is reinforced by an additional 
purple splash near the posterior external border ; this spot may occur both in pale and 
in darkly pigmented elytra. 
The upper surface of the elytra is often iridescent, and so adds to the beauty of 
the worm, giving as it does a bluish tinge to the brown in certain parts of the elytron, 
according to the angle at which light is reflected from it. 
Further, the body wall is pigmented in various ways, and in various tints inde¬ 
pendently of the colour of the elytra. In some specimens the dorsum is almost without 
pigment, but it is usually crossed by narrow bars of brown or olive, which are confined 
to the median region of the back. Very frequently there is a tesselated, or chess-board 
pattern of brown or of olive-green, or of both colours combined, giving a beautiful 
effect (fig. 21). In such cases the pigment is in the form of quadrate patches on each 
side of the middle line on alternate segments, the median line being white ; and in the 
intervening segments, the sides are pale and transverse bars of pigment cross the 
middle line. 
But the most remarkable variant is found in the largest individuals, where the 
entire dorsum is a uniform steel-blue or indigo-blue, or purple(as in Ehlers’s fig. 1 , 1913), 
with the bases of the parapods white or pale pink, or of a rather deeper lilac colour. 
