FAMILY PALINURIDAE LATREILLE, 1802 Remarks. Three species of palinurid lobsters were listed by Morgan (2000) as being present on Christmas Island: P. longipes A. Milne-Edwards, 1868, P. penicillatus (Olivier, 1791) and P. versicolor (Latreille, 1804) (see also George, 1968). We did not obtain the latter species in Christmas Island but collected it from Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and believe P. longipes may be a misidentification of P. femoristriga (Von Martens, 1872), a species we found to be common on Christmas Island (see discussion below). Local weekend fishermen at Cocos (Keeling) Islands also told us that they occasionally catch a large species of lobster in the outer reefs of the atoll, and from their description, it is almost certainly P. ornatus (Fabricius, 1798), a widespread Indo-West Pacific species. They comment, however, that the two most common species in Cocos (Keeling) Islands are P. versicolor and P. penicillatus, as our surveys also confirm.

Published as part of Ng, Peter K. L. & Naruse, Tohru, 2014, The lobsters of Christmas Island and Cocos (Keeling) Islands, with new records of Palinurellus wieneckii (De Man, 1881) and Enoplometopus voigtmanni Türkay, 1989 (Crustacea: Decapoda: Palinuridae, Scyllaridae, Enoplometopidae), pp. 305-312 in Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 30 on page 305, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20249851