Book Description

Specimens of new Harpacticoida species were obtained during the California Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), Phase II, Monitoring Program (CAMP) between November 1986 and May 1989. The CAMP project was a multidisciplinary study to detect and evaluate the long-term biological impacts of continental shelf oil drilling and production. The study was centered around a proposed platform site named Julius, which was never put into service. Samples were collected in the Santa Maria Basin on a regional scale (10- 20 km). Harpacticoids are the second most abundant meiofaunal taxa in the Santa Maria Basin. Harpacticoids have been intensively studied in the Atlantic OCS. However, Pacific studies are limited to collections made in shallow water. There are a great number of undescribed species in the CAMP samples taken from the Santa Maria Basin. The present study is rather limited in scope and only touches on some of the dominate species found. It contains full taxonomic descriptions of six species, a pictorial key of 18 dominant species, and drawings of 42 other unknown species.