The pontoniine shrimp fauna of Australia
Abstract
The caridean family Palaemonidae Samouelle consists of two major subfamilies. The Palaemoninae are conspicuous in tropical freshwater and temperate marine habitats and are almost entirely free-living. The Pontoniinae are almost exclusively tropical and subtropical marine commensals and are rarely found in temperate or fresh waters. They occur most abundantly in the warm shallow waters of tropical coral reefs and the species probably present in deeper waters here have so far been little studied. The use of scuba-diving as a collecting method in recent years has greatly increased the efficiency of sampling coral reefs and other shallow water marine animals. Precise information can now be obtained for many species with regard to their habitats or associations. Many of the more cryptic species could not be reliably collected by any earlier method and so remained 'rare' and little known. Coral reefs are famous for the diversity of the fauna that they support, and the Great Barrier Reef and the caridean shrimps are no exception to this generalisation. Among the marine shrimps in Australian seas only the snapping shrimps of the family Alpheidae exceed the number of species of the subfamily Pontoniinae. ...
