Invertebrate Fauna of the Kimberley Islands, Western Australia.

The major gap in the surveys of the shallow water marine fauna of Western Australia is the Kimberley region. The Kimberley is a vast expanse of land in the northeastern corner of Western Australia, the closest point of which is some 2600 km from Perth by air. The area is sparsely inhabited and there are few roads. Access to the coast is largely by sea. The coastal towns of Derby and Wyndham in the Kimberley are small, with less than five thousand people each, and are separated by a distance of over 2000 km along the coast; there are no coastal settlements between Derby and Wyndham. The marine invertebrate fauna of the Kimberleys is virtually unknown. In 1976 the Western Australian Museum and Field Museum of Natural History mounted a major expedition to the Kimberley which was centered on the Mitchell Plateau-Admiralty Gulf area, one of the few coastal localities accessible from shore. The work undertaken was primarily terrestrial (Anon, 1981) but included two studies of marine molluscs (Wells, 1981; Wells and Slack-Smith, 1981). The Admiralty Gulf area is thus the only part of the Kimberley from which any substantial marine invertebrate collections have been made, and these are restricted to molluscs.
The second goal of the 1988 expedition was thus to survey the marine invertebrate fauna of the Kimberleys to obtain specimens for the permanent collections. A subsidiary goal was to develop a knowledge of working in this remote area with a view to selecting areas for future work if funding and a vessel can be obtained.