Three new species of hagfish lMyxinidaec Eptatretusr from the Galápagos Islands

Abstract

The Galapagos Islands consist of about ten principal islands and over 100 smaller ones on the equator about 500 miles off the coast of Ecuador. The biodiversity found in these islands by Darwin (1896) is also expressed in the marine fauna (McCosker, 1997); three new species of hagfish were found in only eight specimens from four trap sets (Fig. 1). An exploration off South America and the Galapagos Islands in 1891 by the U.S. Fish Commission Steamer Albatross reported only one species of hagfish, Myxine circifrons Garman (1899), taken off the Gulf of Panama. Several species of Eptatretus with from nine to fourteen gill pouches have since been reported from the eastern Pacific coast (Wisner and McMillan, 1990), and one species with seven gills, E. laurahubbsae McMillan and Wisner (1984), from the Juan Fernandez Islands, Chile. The new species described below are the first hagfish reported from the Galapagos Islands, and the first Eptatretus with five, six, and eight gill pouches known from the eastern Pacific. Until the formation of the Panamanian land bridge there was a longstanding connection between the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which provided a passage for hagfish to move into the eastern Pacific from the Caribbean. These new species may be more closely related to the Eptatretus with five to eight gills found in the Caribbean and western Atlantic than to any cur