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Page 8 THE FESTIVUS Vol. XXXIX: Supplement
the 1958 Expedition, Hertlein and Allison (1968)
described six new species, of which five are here
considered valid. They also reviewed three previously
described mollusks and discussed one unnamed species
of the genus Omalogyra (Plate 36, figures 7a-c), which
occurs at all of the TEP oceanic islands and remains
without a specific name to this day.
Beginning in 1966 and reaching completion in
1968, the French Centre de Recherches du Service de
Santé des Armées (Research Center of the Health
Service of the Armies) pursued the natural history of
Clipperton on four “Mission Bougainville” Expeditions.
From those Expeditions, Salvat and Ehrhardt (1970)
listed 89 species of mollusks, noting their biogeographic
affinities and commenting on ten of those more
extensively. Salvat & Salvat (1972) brought the number
to 90 by adding the bivalve Pinna rugosa Sowerby,
1835 (Plate 3, figure 6) to the list.
In order to answer a number of urgent questions for
the French government about developmental schemes
for Clipperton, several preliminary expeditions were
sent to Clipperton between 1975 and 1980. Jacques
Cousteau, chief scientist Pierre-Marie Niaussat, plus 23
others aboard Calypso, lived on and studied the island
for six weeks in 1980. The scientific team focused
mainly on the brackish-water lagoon (diving to 40 m)
and to a lesser degree, on the bird and the ubiquitous
land crab populations which had flourished after the
feral pigs had been exterminated in 1958. Several beach
worn mollusks were collected by Spencer Luke (SIO),
one of the Expedition scientists and remain in the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography Collections. Other
than sport and commercial fishermen (Figure 16)
landing on Clipperton and some reporting their beach
finds (Perrin, 1977; Schneider, 2004), Clipperton had
a lull in visitors, especially from the scientific
community, for the next 17 years.
In 1992, under the auspices of the Santa Barbara
Museum of Natural History, I initiated a scientific
expedition co-organized with John D. Jackson
(Appendix 4). We specifically designed the trip to
explore the submarine environs of Clipperton with
SCUBA, limited dredging and tangle net deployments.
In April 1994, 22 members of the “Clipperton 1994
Expedition” departed San Diego, California. Five
members of the 22 participants logged over 160 hours
of diving for mollusks (Chaney, 1994; Appendix 4,
figure 26). The research team examined virtually all
parts of the island while living and diving from the M/V
Royal Star. With renewed interest, and prior to the 1994
Clipperton Expedition, Emerson (1994) researched the
Figure 16. Mexican commercial tuna seiner off Clipperton’s west side
during inclement weather, 2005. Photo: C. Fresser.
museum collections and literature in order to compile
the most comprehensive zoogeographic summary of
Clipperton mollusks to that date. The inventory included
92 species composed of 70 gastropods and 22 bivalves.
Following the “Clipperton 1994 Expedition,” Small
(1994, 1995) and Beals (1995), participants of the
mollusk team, did initial reports of our findings.
Three years later, aboard the R/V El Puma, the
“SURPACLIP-I” cruise organized by the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México made a short visit to the
island from 23 to 25 November 1997 as part of their
oceanographic expedition. Researchers Carricart-
Ganivet and Reyes-Bonilla (1999) presented a complete
study of the scleractinian corals, but the few mollusks
collected on Clipperton were unfortunately lost in the
mail en route from the Natural History Museum of Los
Angeles County (pers. comm., H. Reyes-Bonilla, 2007).
In 1998, Dr. D. Ross Robertson from the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panamá
(STRI), a participant in the 1994 Expedition, organized
the “STRI Clipperton Expedition” taking the Institute’s
research vessel, the R/V Urracá to Clipperton.
Departing from Acapulco, México (Appendix 4), while
living aboard the R/V Urracá from 17 April to 10 May,
I was one of eight scientists. We collected, using
SCUBA and otter trawl, and carried out field
observations mostly concentrating on the fish fauna.
The French “Expédition Clipperton” organized by
Jean-Louis Etienne, was by far the most serious effort to
assess the molluscan fauna of Clipperton. The object-