First Report of Feather Star Tropiometra carinata (Lamarck, 1816) to Andaman and Nicobar Islands

Andaman and Nicobar Islands comprised of 572 islands and islets in the Bay of Bengal (Latitude: 6°-14°N and Longitude: 91°-94°E) with a coast line of 1,962 km and provides a great biodiversity of coral reef ecosystem. Crinoidea is one of the five classes under the phylum Echinodermata. Crinoids are beautiful, delicate and brilliantly colored species. In coral reef communities, crinoids are suspension feeders and they carry out their feeding behavior by the movement of water and mostly they are nocturnal feeder. They use arms movement to catch and feed. Many faunal communities such as crabs, shrimps and brittle star are showing close association with the crinoids species. All living unstalked crinoids species belong to subclass Articulata (Ausich and Messing, 1998) commonly called feather stars and sea lilies. In modern marine environments feather star belongs to order-Comatulida and also a dominant group of living feather star (Messing,1997). They live in intertidal zone to abyssal (Belyaev, 1966; Oji et al., 2009). Comatulids are cup like body structure and with 5 to 200 arms (Towle, 1989). Crinoids represent 600 extant species in World’s Oceans while India represents 80 species, of which 50 species were reported from Andaman and Nicobar Islands (James, 2008). The present study describes new report of Tropiometra carinata (Lamarck, 1816) to Andaman and Nicobar Islands from Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park, Wandoor.