FISHERY BULLETIN; VOL. ()9. NO. 



both of which are ongoing, it should be possible 

 to say more about some of the St. Vincent faunal 

 elements than is appropriate now. Our purpose 

 here is only to provide an annotated summary 

 of the existing records for this island in order 

 to give for the first time a relatively complete 

 list of such a fauna from one specific locality 

 in the Antilles and to iirovide a firmer basis for 

 zoogeographic statements required for ongoing 

 studies in this and other disciplines in the West 

 Indies and Caribbean. 



Although there are a number of individual 

 records of cetaceans from the West Indies (in 

 part summarized by Hershkovitz, 1966) , or re- 

 ports which include as many as three or four 

 species, there are few reports which include 

 enough of the expected species to give sufficient 

 data for evaluating the local cetacean fauna. 

 The best of these are from the northern Antilles 

 (from Cuba by Cuni, 1918, and Aguayo, 1954 ; 

 and from Puerto Rico to Antigua by Erdman, 

 1970). 



Studies similar to ours on small cetaceans, but 

 more detailed, have been conducted on the At- 

 lantic coast of Africa in the vicinity of Senegal 

 and to some lesser degree the Ivory Coast and 

 the Cape Verde Islands. The odontocete ceta- 

 cean fauna in those similar latitudes is remark- 

 ably similar to that of St. Vincent even though 

 the two areas lie some 5000 km apart across the 

 open sea. This similarity extends even to forms 

 such as Steno and Ferrsa that are generally 

 rare in collections. Cadenat and others have 

 published a series of reports on their studies 

 of the African fauna, but a list of the s])ecies 

 found can be had by consulting a combination 

 of two of these (Cadenat, 1919, 1959). The 

 latter also summarizes much of the other liter- 

 ature on the cetaceans of the area. Van Bree 

 and Cadenat (1968) in addition recorded Pepo- 

 nocephala electra from Senegal. 



SPECIES ACCOUNTS 



With the exception of a spotted dolphin, we 

 follow Rice and SchefYer (1968) in our arrange- 

 ment of species and in the scientific and/or com- 

 mon names ai)plicd to them. 



Megaptera novaeangUae (BOROWSKI) — 

 HUMPBACK WHALE 



In early May 1968, an individual of adult 

 size slowly passed close along the lee shore of 

 St. Vincent in a southward direction. Several 

 of the St. Vincent whalemen, familiar with this 

 species from seeing it in a nearby humpback 

 fishery at Bequia, observed this individual from 

 boats but made no effort to harpoon it. The 

 St. Vincent whalemen tell us that they see a 

 few individuals of this species each year but that 

 they never try to harpoon one because of the 

 large size of these whales. 



A few humjjbacks are usually taken each year 

 (mostly from February to April) in the Bequia 

 fishery just to the south in the St. Vincent Gren- 

 adines which utilizes bomb guns in addition to 

 hand harpoons. Accounts of the latter fishery 

 were given by Brown (1945), Fenger (1958), 

 Mitchell (1965), and Quashie (1966).^ An early 

 account of New England whaling vessels hunt- 

 ing humpbacks in the region was included by 

 Lindeman (1880) , but Clark (1887: pi. 183) for 

 as early as 1880 included waters near St. Vincent 

 on a map showing abandoned humpback whaling 

 grounds. These and other reports mention 

 Megaptera in St. Vincent and or nearby waters. 



Steno bredatieiisis (LESSON) — 

 ROUGH-TOOTHED DOLPHIN 



A skull (SV-l-SB) of a specimen of unknown 

 size and sex was obtained from the fishery in 

 the spring of 1969. This is the first record for 

 this species from St. Vincent and from the Ca- 

 ribbean. We find no prior and contemporary 

 basis for Kellogg's (1940: 69) inclusion of this 

 species in the Caribbean fauna, nor for the in- 

 dication by Hall and Kelson (1959: 819) that 

 its range is continuous in the western Atlantic 

 from Virginia to South America. 



The records closest to St. Vincent in the west- 

 ern Atlantic are from off Havana, Cuba (and 

 thus non-Caribbean) to the north, as S. mstratNS 

 (see Aguayo, 1954), and from an unstated lo- 

 cality off the Brazilian coast to the south (Ham- 



" Quashie, I. N. 1966. The whale indu-stry in Bequia. 

 St. Vincent Teachers College, Kingstown, St. Vincent, 

 Unpublished report (file no. 80), 32 p. 



304 



