110 Abstract.— Three new species of hag-fish (Myxinidae, Eptatretus) are de-scribed from the Galapagos Islands. Ecuador. These are the first myxinids known from this region and the first species of Eptatretus with five, six. and eight gill pouches reported from the eastern Pacific. A key to their identifi-cation is presented. Three new species of hagfish (Myxinidae, Eptatretus) from the Galapagos Islands Charmion B. McMillan Marine Biology Research Division, 0202 Scripps Institution ol Oceanography La Jolla, California 92093 E-mail address charmcmig)|uno com Manuscript accepted 7 April 1998. Fish. Bull. 97:110-117 (1999). The Galapagos Islands consist of about ten principal islands and over 100 smaller ones on the equator about 500 miles off the coast of Ec-uador. The biodiversity found in these islands by Darwin (1896) is also expressed in the marine fauna (McCosker, 1997); three new species of hagfish were found in only eight specimens from four trap sets (Fig. 1 ). An exploration off South America and the Galapagos Islands in 1891 by the U.S. Fish Commission Steamer Albatross reported only one species of hagfish, Myxine circifrons Garman ( 1899), taken off the Gulf of Panama. Several species of Eptatretus with from nine to four-teen gill pouches have since been reported from the eastern Pacific coast (Wisner and McMillan, 1990), and one species with seven gills, E. laurahubbsae McMillan and Wisner (1984), from the Juan Fernandez Islands, Chile. The new species de-scribed below are the first hagfish reported from the Galapagos Is-lands, and the first Eptatretus with five, six, and eight gill pouches known from the eastern Pacific. Until the formation of the Panama-nian land bridge there was a long-standing connection between the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which provided a passage for hag-fish to move into the eastern Pacific from the Caribbean. These new spe-cies may be more closely related to the Eptatretus with five to eight gills found in the Caribbean and western Atlantic than to any cur-rently known from the eastern Pa-cific. Future collecting efforts along the coast of Ecuador may reveal Eptatretus similar to those found off the Galapagos Islands; however, until further material is available and genetic studies are made for comparison, we can only speculate on possible origins of these Gala-pagos hagfishes. Although the body color of most species of Eptatretus is brown to black, Fernholm ( 1991 ) described a species of Eptatretus on the basis of one specimen with a highly unusual pink body, stating that its color was probably caused by diet. Of the eight specimens reported here, the seven larger ones are dark purplish-brown to black or dark gray where the slime has not been removed. The smallest specimen (about 142 mm), possibly an albino, is ivory to light tan. Not enough is known about the early development of hag-fish to determine if this tiny speci-men would have become darker with age. Albinism has been re-ported by Dean ( 1903) and Jensen ( 1959), and I have collected one, an adult E. deani (Evermann and Goldsborough, 1907), which was pinkish-white when alive and light tan color in formalin. Head grooves are present near the eyespots of the seven large specimens, but not on the smallest hagfish. These grooves, found in many other species of Eptatretus (McMillan and Wisner, 1984) and once thought similar to lateral lines,
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