The Fauna Of Atlantic Marine Caves - Evidence Of Dispersal By Sea floor Spreading While Maintaining Ties To Deep Waters

Evidence is presented that significant ties exist between the faunas of marine caves and those of the deep seas, that marine cave faunas may contain very old elements, and that marine caves have served as faunal refuges over very long periods of time. In addition, the term "crevicular" is introduced to designate those aquatic habitats formed by crevasses in and among rocks, as well as to describe the organisms that live in those habitats. We feel that data recently gathered in Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos, Ascension, and the Canary Islands (Fig. 1) shed light on some of the puzzling distributional patterns noted for cavernicolous crustaceans found on oceanic islands of the Atlantic and the Pacific, and bear generally on sea floor spreading. In our work we have been dealing exclusively with (and drawn our conclusions from) invertebrates-primarily shrimps-that inhabit anchialine waters and ma- rine caves. That is, waters having no surface connection with the sea, but which nevertheless contain salt or brackish water the level of which fluctuates with the tides.