FISHERY BULLETIN: VOL. 87, NO. 4, 1989 



(1969), as well as Bigelow and Schroeder (1939) 

 in an earlier study, have both noted a strong 

 affinity between organically rich sediment and 

 the occurrence of the Gulfs largest pandalid, 

 Pandalus borealis. The observed occurrence of 

 shrimp in our photographs corresponds to sub- 

 strates containing silt and, generally, finer 

 grained materials (Fig. 3), thus, once again, 

 confirming the relationship between pandalid 

 shrimp and, presumably, high organic sedi- 

 ments in the Gulf of Maine. In the last of the 

 three groups, for which there is information re- 

 lating distributional patterns to the environ- 

 ment, Franz et al. (1981) identified temperature 

 as the major controlling factor of asteroid dis- 

 tribution. Their study identified 15 different 

 species of seastar in the Gulf of Maine which 

 they assigned to 3 zoogeographic groups. These 

 species have a variety of substrate require- 

 ments. In our study temperature varied little 

 between dive locations, depth, and year (App. 

 Table 1), whereas sediment type did. This vari- 

 ation in substrate is reflected in Figure 3 where 

 asteroids are shown to occur on almost all sedi- 

 ment types. Although sediment type is obvi- 

 ously not the only factor that determines a 

 species occurrence, it is important when con- 

 sidering the patterns of species distribution 

 throughout the Gulf of Maine and should be 

 evaluated on a species specific level. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



Support for this work was received from 

 NOAA's National Undersea Research Progi'am. 

 We thank Page Valentine of the U.S. Geological 

 Survey, Woods Hole, MA for supplying the 

 sediment grain-size analysis. Thanks also go to 

 the ship and sub crews of the Harbor Branch 

 Oceanographic Institution and to two anony- 

 mous reviewers whose efforts greatly improved 

 the final manuscript. 



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