PAPUA NIUGINI

A checklist of the marine and estuarine fishes of New Ireland Province is presented, with special emphasis on Kavieng District, combining both previous and new records. After the recent KAVIENG 2014 expedition, a total of 1325 species in 153 families were recorded from the region. The largest families are the Gobiidae, Pomacentridae, Labridae, Serranidae, Apogonidae, Lutjanidae, Chaetodontidae, Blenniidae, Carangidae, Acanthuridae, Scaridae, Holocentridae, Syngnathidae, Lethrinidae and Scorpaenidae. A total of 810 fish species (61.1 % of the total marine and estuarine fish fauna) are recorded from New Ireland for the first time.

KAVIENG 2014, MADEEP

BIOPAPUA, KAVIENG 2014, MADEEP, PAPUA NIUGINI

Little is known of New Guinea's deep benthic communities. In fall 2010, the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle, Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement, and University of Papua New Guinea spearheaded an international three-leg cruise, BioPapua, aimed at exploring the deep waters of eastern Papua New Guinea and its satellite islands. Special attention was given to faunal assemblages associated with sunken wood and decomposing vegetation as well as seamount summits and slopes. In this article, we review the information available on the deep ecosystems of Papua New Guinea and summarize preliminary results of the BioPapua cruise.

BIOPAPUA

The deep-sea part of the ‘Papua Niugini Biodiversity Expedition’ surveyed the deep-sea environments along the coasts of New Guinea Island in the Bismarck Sea, from the Vitiaz Strait to the border between Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Irian Jaya. This expedition was a follow-up of the BIOPAPUA cruise (2010) that gave some of the first insights into the diversity of the deep-sea fauna of the Bismarck and Solomon Seas for environments other than deep-sea hydrothermal vents. The main aims of the cruise were to survey the diversity of the fauna of (i) hard bottoms that are typically found on deep seamounts, (ii) Astrolabe Bay from 200 m to about 1000 m, (iii) the chemosynthetic environments of the deep sea, including cold-seep environments and plant debris. Astrolabe Bay was one of our targets because its topography allows sampling over the complete bathymetric gradient covered by our sampling gear (down to 1000 m depth), and the recent start of nickel refining activities in the bay is a potential threat to its marine fauna for which little reference data are available. Sampling in the bay revealed not only a diversified fauna associated with soft bottoms and plant debris, but also a chemosynthetic fauna typical of coldseep environments (e.g. siboglinid worms and bathymodioline mussels) below the Ramu refinery. Although the refinery activities had officially started just one week before our work in the area, we observed impacts of these activities. Our molecular work indicates that the siboglinid tubeworm species and one of the two mussel species collected below the Ramu refinery have so far only been documented from this location, despite intensive sampling effort. This illustrates the potential destructive effects of human activities in areas where the diversity and uniqueness of deep-sea communities are poorly understood.

BIOPAPUA, MADEEP, PAPUA NIUGINI

A new species of catshark, provisionally placed in the genus Galeus, is described from Papua New Guinea based on 7 specimens collected during recent deepwater surveys of the region. The new species, Galeus corriganae, is closest to G. priapus from New Caledonia and G. gracilis from northwestern Australia but differs in several morphological characters. A reclassification of the catshark groups is required to revise the familial and generic arrangement of the group.

BIOPAPUA, MADEEP, PAPUA NIUGINI

PAPUA NIUGINI

BIOPAPUA, KAVIENG 2014, MADEEP, PAPUA NIUGINI

BIOPAPUA, PAPUA NIUGINI