This page links to photos of ophiuroids (brittlestars) we have seen in the Marshall Islands. Many of our identifications are highly tentative, even those made only to the genus level. Members of this group appear to be quite variable and references to living specimens are slim. Descriptions in the scientific literature have been largely based on anatomical details such as the shapes and arrangement of the hard plates and spines that make up body, details that are hard to distinguish without having the animal in hand or under a good dissecting microscope. A number of our as yet unidentified species were put into genera based only on similarities with other species and most need to be verified. In addition, we suspect that some species are quite variable in color, so a number of those we figure as different may in fact be the same, particularly in a variable genus such as Ophiothrix. We welcome corrections at uwkwaj@yahoo.com. Sizes given are rough estimates; measurements were generally not taken in the field.
Click on a thumbnail below to bring up a page with larger photos and information about that species; for variable species, several different thumbnails may load the same page.
Coleman
(2007)
Colin
& Arneson (1995)
Gosliner
et al (1996)
Hoover
(1999)
Humann
& DeLoach (2010)
Ryanskiy
(2020)
iNaturalist
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