New crustaceans from the deep waters of the Great Australian Bight and their rapid documentation using the Scratchpad platform

A collection of benthic infauna from the deep waters of the Great Australian Bight (5 multi-core samples taken at each of 200, 400, 1000, 1500 and 2000 m depths) revealed a highly endemic and undescribed crustacean fauna.... [ view full abstract ]

A collection of benthic infauna from the deep waters of the Great Australian Bight (5 multi-core samples taken at each of 200, 400, 1000, 1500 and 2000 m depths) revealed a highly endemic and undescribed crustacean fauna. Ninety-two percent of the amphipod species and 94% of the isopod species, identified from this material, were undescribed and new to science. There have been relatively few surveys of deep-water crustaceans in Australia, but the proportion of undescribed species in the deep GAB was consistent with similar depths along the Western Australian shelf (Poore et al. 2014).
We created a Scratchpad website (http://gab.myspecies.info) as a way of rapidly communicating our taxonomic data, basic descriptions, images and illustrations to the scientific community. Scratchpad pages are not intended to replace formal, peer-reviewed and published taxonomic descriptions. Rather, they provide an efficient way to highlight the biodiversity of a particular area and most importantly, they make the material visible to taxonomists around the world, who we hope, will include taxa from these collections in any future revisionary studies.
This work was completed by taxonomists from Museum Victoria as part of activities within the Great Australian Bight Research Program. This program is a collaboration between BP, CSIRO, the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI), the University of Adelaide, and Flinders University.