Checklist of the Australian Cirripedia

Abstract

The occurrence and distribution of thoracican and acrothoracican barnacles in Australian waters are listed for the first time since Darwin (1854). The list comprises 204 species. Depth data and museum collection data (for Australian museums) are given for each species. Geographical occurrence is also listed by area and depth (littoral, neuston, sublittoral or deep). Australian contributions to the biology of Australian cimpedes are summarised in an appendix. All listings are indexed by genus and species. JONES. D.S.. J.T. ANDERSON & D.T. ANDERSON, 1990. Checklist of the Australian Cirripedia. Technical Reports of the Australian Museum No. 3: 1-38. Darwin (185 1, 1854) included a number of cirripedes from Australian waters in his comprehensive survey of the group. The second volume of Darwin's monograph (1854: 171) contains a list of species characteristic of the Australian region, notable for its brevity but at the same time for its large endemic content. If one adds to this list the species of Lepas recognised by Darwin in Australian seas as part of their world distribution, the cirripede fauna known for Australia in 1854 comprised 28 species as listed in Table 1. Darwin's list included many of the common and characteristic cirripedes of Australian shores, but only a few sublittoral species. The general perception of the Australian barnacle fauna by non-specialists has changed little since Darwin's time. W.J. Dakin's "Australian Seashores", for example, in the revised edition by I. Bennett (1987), adds only &pas fascicularis and Balanus variegatus as components of the known shore and drift fauna, an insignificant change. The Fauna of Australia, Volume 1A (Dyne & Walton, 1987) categorises cirripedes in Australiamerely as "...known to be present...". Thereason for this limited recognition is plain. Darwin's monograph remains the only published listing of Australian cirripedes. The well-known Australian student of cirripedes, Elizabeth C. Pope, made extensive collections from all parts of the continent during the nineteen forties, fifties and sixties. The records and specimens from these collections are housed in the Australian Museum, Sydney, where Miss Pope was the Curator of Crustacea. Although Miss Pope published in detail mainly on the chthamaloids (Pope, 1965), we have in our possession her unpublished checklist of Australian cirripedes, assembled during the 19607s, in which she named 61 species, including the 28 listed by Darwin. In a century of investigation, therefore, 33 more species of barnacles had been added to the Australian fauna list, but only expert cirripedologists were aware of it. Foster