The class Holothuroidea (Animalia, Echinodermata, Echinozoa) exhibits an extraordinary breadth of distribution across all oceans, filling niches in effectively every benthic zone of the marine environment from the intertidal to the abyssal (Pawson 1982). Sea cucumbers are frequently among the largest and most diverse classes of benthic invertebrate in the intertidal and subtidal and constitute the majority of total biomass in slope and abyssal benthic systems. While most sea cucumbers are either sedentary or comparatively slow-moving, a number of species move periodically by swimming and a few are primarily bathypelagic free swimmers (Miller and Pawson 1990). Holothurians exhibit a broad range of feeding strategies; however, most are primarily dependent assimilation of settling particulate organic matter, microphytobenthic production and/or benthic infauna for organic material.