Old and Unreported Collections of Alpheid Shrimp from the Zoologisches Museum, Berlin, Principally from Melanesia

Abstract

Previously unstudied collections of 70 species of alpheid shrimp held by the Zoologisches Museum (East Berlin) are reported upon. Except for four species from the west coast of the Americas, all specimens were from the Indo-Pacific faunal realm, and principally came from the area of the Pacific south of the equator and west of the International Date Line known as Melanesia (exclusive of the Fiji Archipelago), with 46 species from this area. Of these 46, only II species had been previously reported in this region. All of the German specimens were collected before 1914, but we have supplemented the records with six additional collections from Melanesia made in the last two decades. No new species or subspecies are described; one species, Alpheus japonicus Miers, 1879, heretofore unfigured, is shown in drawings from the type specimens in the British Museum (Natural History), and one species, Synalpheus tridens (Borradaile, as Alpheinus tridens) 1899, is placed in synonymy to Synalpheus stimpsonii (De Man) 1888.