FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 



461 



objects. About Massachusetts Bay, lobster pots 

 are favorite resorts for them when set on stony 

 bottom. For instance, W. F. Clapp tells us that 

 one pot in every 8 or 10 will yield a lumpfish on 

 the broken ground off the entrance to Duxbury 

 Harbor, and they often hold to the lower sides of 

 lobster cars, probably for shade. Occasionally 

 one is found clinging to one of the poles of a trap 

 or weir, though this is a much less common event 

 in the Gulf of Maine than it is in Scottish waters, 

 where they are frequently caught in salmon nets 

 set along shore. Welsh notes one entangled in a 

 gill net set off Great Boars Head in April 1913; 

 they have (rarely) been found clinging to floating 

 logs or inside a floating box or barrel; sometimes 

 they strand on the beach; and there is at least one 

 record of a lumpfish clinging to a mackerel. 



So far as known the only regular migrations 

 carried out by the lumpfish are the involuntary 

 drifts of its young fry at the surface, and a general 

 movement of the adults into shoal water at spawn- 

 ing time followed by an offshore movement after- 

 ward. 



The young fry swim at the surface, and we 

 have taken them so often in our tow nets that 

 we have learned to expect them wherever there 

 are floating masses of rockweed (a refuge in which 

 all but the smallest regularly hide, or to the fronds 

 of which they cling). 



Most of the lumpfish taken in tow nets or 

 dipped up are less than 2 inches long, but large 

 adults are sometimes seen at the surface; more 

 often, perhaps, in the Bay of Fundy than else- 

 where in the Gulf, their presence at the surface 

 being determined less by the age of the individual 

 fish than by the presence or absence of floating 

 seaweed. However, most of the young lumpfish 

 have left the surface by winter; indeed very few 

 have been taken at any depth in the Gulf of Maine 

 during the cold months, 32 but we picked up one 

 on the surface off Lurcher Shoal on April 12, 1920, 

 and another off Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, on Jan- 

 uary 4, 1921. 



Food. — We have no first-hand information to 

 offer as to the diet of the lumpfish. In British 

 waters this has been found to consist chiefly of 

 isopods, amphipods, and other small crustaceans, 

 with various other invertebrates, including worms 



and soft-bodied mollusks. And its diet is much 

 the same in the Gulf of Maine for Cox and Ander- 

 son 33 report euphausiid shrimps (Meganycti- 

 phanes) , fragments of jellyfish (Aurelia), amphipod 

 crustaceans (Hyperia), caprellid crustaceans, with 

 the remains of small fish in the stomachs of lumps 

 from Passamaquoddy Bay. And large numbers 

 of young clupeids have occasionally been found 

 in their stomachs. This, too, is one of the few 

 fish that regularly feed on ctenophores and on 

 Medusae. Thus 25 specimens examined at Woods 

 Hole by Vinal Edwards contained nothing but 

 ctenophores. But lumps, like most other fishes, 

 cease feeding during the spawning season. The 

 lumpfish, in its turn, is said to be a favorite food 

 of seals. Certainly it is so weak a swimmer that 

 it would fall an easy prey to them. 



In Scottish waters, where many observations 

 have been made on the life of the lumpfish 34 

 spawning (and the corresponding inshore migra- 

 tion) takes place from February until near the 

 end of May. And the evidence afforded by our 

 tow nettings suggests an equally protracted 

 spawning season in the Gulf of Maine, for while 

 we have taken larvae 27 mm. long as early as 

 May 10, we have taken newly hatched larvae 

 (6 to 7 mm.) as late as June 19 in the inner parts 

 of the Gulf and as late as July 23 on the northeast 

 part of Georges Bank, with one only 10.5 mm 

 long on August 22 off Seguin Island. In the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence, however, where vernal 

 warming is later than in the Gulf of Maine, lump- 

 fish probably do not commence spawning until 

 the middle of April, for Cox and Anderson found 

 no larvae there until late in June, with their 

 observations pointing to late May as the height 

 of the breeding season and to mid-June as about 

 its termination. 35 Presumably its period of incu- 

 bation is about as long with us as it is in European 

 waters of like temperature, i. e., 6 weeks to 2 

 months. 



On the other side of the Atlantic the lumpfish 

 spawns in very shallow water, chiefly close to 

 low-tide mark. But the fact that the egg masses 

 (more or less familiar objects on European shores) 



11 Cox and Anderson (Contrib. Canadian Biol., N. Ser., vol. 1, 1922, p. 5) 

 state that the Canadian Research steamer Prince has taken only two lump- 

 fish in the Bay of Fundy in winter, both of them small. 



" Contrib. Canadian Biol. N. Ser., vol. 1, 1922, p. 9. 



M Mcintosh, 14th Ann. Kept., Fishery Board Scotland, (1895) 1896, Pt. 3, 

 pp. 173-178, and Fulton, 24th Ann. Rept., Fishery Board Scotland, (1905) 

 1906, Pt. 3, pp. 169-178. 



» The lumpfish spawns from late May through June on the coast of Green- 

 land; in April and May in the Baltic; and early in the spring in Norwegian 

 waters. 



