Terrestrial and Fresh‐Water Fauna of the Marquesas Islands

Abstract

I propose in this paper to say something of a project, initiated in more prosperous times, and carried on, despite the depression, by a group of prominent and far-seeing business men and scientists in Hawaii. The classic work of R. C. L. Perkins ('13), has formed the basis of subsequent economic work that has saved the Hawaiian Sugar Planters millions of dollars. It was to some extent with this as an inspiration, that Dr. C. Montague Cooke, an international authority on Pacific land snail faunas and a Trustee of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, and Dr. Arthur L. Dean, and Mr. John E. Russell and his associates, initiated the following researches some six years ago. The object of their investigations, carried on in association with wellknown entomologists like Dr. R. N. Clhapman, Director of the Experiment Station of the Association of Hawaiian Pineapple Caniners, and Mr. C. E. Pemberton, Executive Entomologist to the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, and the forester, Mr. Charles S. Judd, was to collect and study the insects of the isolated and ancient Marquesas Islands (Mumford and Adamson, '33), both in relation to their environment-physical and biotic-and in comparison with other Pacific faunias. Though the generally accepted theory is that the faunal migration waves originated on the western borders of the Pacific, gradually losing their force as they travelled eastward, ethnologists, zoologists, and botanists have long debated the possibility of some American influence coming from the opposite direction. The strategic position of the Marquesas, as the principal high islands near the eastern border of Polynesia,2 promised results of great