Author Description

Tropical Deep-Sea Benthos, a continuation of Résultats des Campagnes MUSORSTOM, is a series dedicated to the inventory and description of the deep-sea fauna of the world, with special emphasis on the most extensive, yet remote and least explored, region--the Indo-West Pacific. The comprehensive series of marine expeditions undertaken by the French National Museum of Natural History and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) continue to collect many new, strange, and sometimes colorful crustaceans. The present volume includes for the first time results from recent expeditions off Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea always had a special place in the heart of marine biologists. Firstly, but barely explored during the expedition of the Challenger (1875), deep-sea fauna from Papua New Guinea remained a gap of knowledge until the recent series of expeditions launched by the museum: to Biopapua (2010), Papua Niugini (2012), Madeep (2014) and Kavieng (2014). From these expeditions' amazing samplings of benthic fauna, an international network of naturalists and taxonomists, federated around the Tropical Deep-Sea Benthos program, has described since 2012 more than 258 new species of mollusks, fishes, sea spiders, corals, and crustaceans. This special Papua New Guinea volume comprises descriptions and new occurrences for more than 360 species including cirripeds, crabs, armored shrimps, ghost shrimps, and squat lobsters. Many are illustrated with spectacular color images of freshly caught specimens. With forty-four new species of crustaceans described in this volume, more than three hundred new marine species will have been discovered around Papua New Guinea and its satellite islands.