WILLIAMS, BOWMAN, and DAMKAER: THE OPOSSUM SHRIMP, NEOMYSIS AMERICANA 



Distribution 



Neomysis americana inhabits estuaries and 

 nearshore ocean from mesohaline reaches of the 

 St. Lawrence River near St. Joachim on the north 

 shore and Montmagny on the south, downstream 

 around the Gaspe Peninsula, and from southern 

 Newfoundland southward through the maritime 

 provinces of Canada, along the United States to 

 St. Augustine, Fla. Collections south of St. 

 Augustine yielded no specimens, but the species 

 may range as far southward as Cape Canaveral. 



Prominent in estuaries, N. americana is also 

 found at sea. Whiteley (1948) recorded it on 

 Georges Bank inside the 100-m margin but most 

 abundantly in water 75 m deep or less. Wigley 

 and Burns (1971) showed essentially this pattern 

 in their distribution summary. It was partly the 

 distribution shown by these samples produced 

 with the aid of grab samplers and dredges at a 

 great number of stations to depths beyond 100 m 

 between Nova Scotia and southern Florida that 

 suggested an oceanic population north of Cape 

 Henry, Va., separated from a southern estuarine 

 one. None of their southern samples contained 

 N. americana. 



Neomysis americana was found in only four 

 samples (total of 10 specimens) from the Theodore 

 N. Gill material. These were: Cruise 4, 5 October- 

 4 November 1953, Station 56 off Myrtle Beach, 

 S.C. (2) - Cruise 9, 3 November-12 December 1954, 

 Station 22 off St. Augustine, Fla. (1); Station 23 

 off mouth of St. Johns River, Fla. (6); Station 56 

 (1). All these stations were in water 10 m deep 

 or less. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



We are indebted to Richard W. Heard, Jr., Mar- 

 vin W. Wass, and Thomas D. Myers for material 

 from Georgia-Florida, Virgini-a, and Delaware 

 respectively, and to the University of North Carol- 

 lina Institute of Marine Sciences for transfer of 

 specimens to the USNM collections. We thank 

 George R. Zug for help with the statistical analy- 

 sis and Bruce B. Collette and Isabel Perez Far- 

 fante for critical review of the manuscript. Maria 

 M. Dieguez drafted the graphs. 



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