Les pycnogonides de la croisière 1951 du « Président Théodore Tissier »

The 1951 cruise of the "Président-Théodore-Tissier" was conducted from February 13th to June 30th, 1951. During these four and a half months, the vessel, which departed from Brest, stopped successively in Madeira, the French Caribbean, the Bermudas, Woods Hole, Halifax, on the banks of Newfoundland, the Azores Islands, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and then sailed back to Brest after 13,000 miles in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. The North-Western Atlantic and the Caribbean Pycnogonida have been the focus in 1948 of a very comprehensive and documented review by J. W. Hedgpeth followed by a catalogue of the stations of the different expeditions which worked in the Northern Atlantic Ocean and the studied species. Moreover, the work of Marcus (1940) on the South-American Pycnogonida is an excellent basis for the study of the tropical Atlantic Pycnogonida. Recently, J.-H. Stock (1954 a) published a preliminary study on Pycnogonida collected at small depths in the Caribbean. During the 1951 cruise of the "Président-Théodore-Tissier", 15 species of Pycnogonida were collected at 16 stations which can be classified, from a biogeographic point of view, in five groups of unequal importance: the floating sargassum (8 stations), the Little Caribbean (5 stations), the Bermudas (1 station), the surroundings of Wood Hole (1 station), the banks of Newfoundland (1 station).