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CHAPTER2—MARINE INVERTEBRATE
General Introduction
The maritime region of Maharashtra comprises an extensive coastline of
720 kilometres and the sea waters around it, with the sea bottom mainly
consisting of fairly hard clayey mud, interspersed with sandy patches. The
bottom slopes gradually in northern Maharashtra, but is steeper in the
southern half. Because of a number of streams and rivulets flowing into
the sea, marshes are common. At intervals, hilly coastal tracts abutting into
the sea give rise to rocky foreshores; rock however, does not extend far
out into the sea. Coral is almost completely absent.
This maritime region is inhabited by a rich variety of invertebrate
communities, living at different depths of water and sea bottom, mainly
concealed from view and requiring special devices for their collection and
study. A maritime region where collection can be easily made and which,
consequently, has been studied the most, is the region influenced by tides,
commonly called the inter-tidal zone.
A majority of the marine invertebrates are minute creatures, either
throughout their life cycle or at some stage of their life history, rendering
the compilation of such groups a difficult task in marine invertebrate
taxonomy. As such the list of marine invertebrates presented in this
chapter pertains mostly to the intertidal zones, particularly off Bombay
and Ratnagiri, where such taxonomic studies have been more
comprehensively undertaken.
Much of the work, especially at Bombay, was done as part of theses
submitted for postgraduate degrees, and some of this has still remained
unpublished. The present part of the Fauna volume cannot, therefore, be
anything more than a compilation of the faunal lists extracted from these
theses, as well as from some published papers. It may here be mentioned
that, in some cases, workers have not realized the significance of usage of
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