FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 337 



chusctts 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. Lumps often hold to 

 the lower sides of lobster cars, probably for their 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 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 box or barrel. Sometimes they strand on the beach, and 

 there is at least one record of a lump sucking to a mackerel. 



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 species of fish that are pelagic when young but live on the sea floor when 

 adult leave the surface at a rather definite stage in growth. This hardly applies 

 to the lump, however, for while most of those taken in tow nets or dipped up are less 

 than 2 inches long, very large adults are sometimes seen at the surface, more often, 

 perhaps, in the Bay of Fundy than elsewhere in the Gulf, and their presence at 

 the surface is determined less by the age of the individual fish than by the presence 

 or absence of floating seaweed. 



Most of the young lumps have left the surface by winter; indeed very few have 

 been taken at any depth in the Gulf of Maine during the cold months, 95 but we 

 picked up one on the surface off Lurcher Shoal on April 12, 1920, and another off 

 Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, on January 4, 1921. Although this is an ungainly fish it 

 can swim more rapidly for a short distance by its vigorous tail strokes than its 

 shape might suggest, and the young pelagic fry are very active. 



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 — e. g., worms and 

 soft -bodied mollusks — and its diet is much the same in the Gulf of Maine for Cox 

 and Anderson (1922, p. 9) report euphausiid shrimps (Meganyctiphanes), fragments 

 of jellyfish (Aurelia), amphipods (Hyperia) , caprellids, and the remains of small fish 

 in the stomachs of lumps from Passamaquoddy Bay. This is one of the few fish 

 that regularly feed on ctenophores and Medusae, and 25 specimens examined at 

 Woods Hole by Vinal Edwards contained nothing but ctenophores. Lumps also 

 eat fish, and large numbers of young clupeids have occasionally been found in their 

 stomachs. But like most other fishes, they cease feeding during the spawning season. 



Breeding habits. — 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 spawning time followed by an offshore 

 migration after breeding is completed. In Scottish waters, where many observa- 

 tions have been made on the life of the lump, 96 spawning (and the corresponding 



» Coi and Anderson (1922, p. 5) state that the Canadian Research steamer Prince has taken only two (both small) in the 

 Bay of Fundy in winter. 



»• Mcintosh, Fourteenth Annual Report, Fishery Board for Scotland, 1895 (1896), Part III, pp. 173-178, and Fulton, Twenty- 

 fourth Annual Report, Fishery Board for Scotland, 1905 (1906), Part III, pp. 169-178. 



