RECORDS OF THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM 84 287–343 (2015) DOI: 10.18195/issn.0313-122x.84.2015.287-343 SUPPLEMENT Kimberley marine biota. Historical data: molluscs Richard C. Willan1, Clay Bryce2 and Shirley M. Slack-Smith2 1 Malacology Department, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, GPO Box 4646, Darwin, Northern Territory 0801, Australia. 2 Department of Aquatic Zoology, Western Australian Museum, Locked Bag 49, Welshpool DC, Western Australia 6989, Australia. * Email:
[email protected] ABSTRACT – This paper is part of a series compiling data on the biodiversity of the shallow water (< 30 m) marine and estuarine fora and fauna of the Kimberley region of coastal northern Western Australia and adjacent offshore regions out to the edge of the Australian continental shelf (termed the ‘Kimberley Project Area’ throughout this series – see Sampey et al. 2014). This series of papers, which synthesise species level data accumulated by Australian museums to December 2008, serves as a baseline for future biodiversity surveys and to assist with future management decisions. This present paper deals with the molluscs of the classes Polyplacophora, Gastropoda, Bivalvia, Scaphopoda and Cephalopoda. The molluscs, the most numerically diverse of all of the groups analysed in the Project Area, comprise a total of 1,784 species. Given that (a) the present collation is tightly constrained in terms of locations sampled, depth ranges, dates and institutional databases, (b) there are many undersampled groups (perhaps the majority of families), and (c) the rate of species discovery for molluscs within the Project Area is rising at a rate of approximately 18% per year (according to two independent analyses outlined herein), it is predicted that the eventual total for the Project Area will exceed 5000 species.