THE LANCELETS 



BRANCHIOSTOMIDAE 

 By Joel W. Hedgpeth, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California 



There are a number of sporadic records for 

 Amphioxiis along the Gulf coast indicating the 

 occurrence of one or more species of lancelets 

 throughout the area in favorable localities. Ac- 

 cording to Bigelow and Farfante (1948) the species 

 occurring on the coast of western and north- 

 western Florida (as far as Pensacola), sometimes 

 in very large numbers, is Branchiostoma caribaeum 

 Sundevall. These authors consider Branchios- 

 toma floridae Hubbs (1922), to which specimens 

 from this area were previously assigned, a syn- 

 onym of B. caribaeum and give the range of this 

 species as from Chesapeake Bay to the West 

 Indies. A small collection of lancelets made by 

 T. E. Pulley in Lydia Ann Channel, Aransas Bay, 

 Texas, was determined by Gunter as Branchios- 

 toma caribaeum (Gunter and Knapp, 1951). Re- 



cently, lancelets have been collected from the 

 Chandeleur Islands and from various places on 

 the Mississippi coast but have not been positively 

 identified (Hefley and Shoemaker 1952). 



LITERATURE CITED 



Bigelow, Henry B., and Farfante, Lsabel Perez. 

 1948. Lancelets. In: Fishes of the western North At- 

 lantic, Pt. 1, pp. 1-28. 

 Gunter, Gordon, and Knapp, Frank T. 



1951. Fishes new, rare or seldom recorded from the 

 Texas coast. Texas Jour. Sci. 3 (1): 134-138. 



Hefley, Harold M., and Shoemaker, Hurst. 



1952. The occurrence of Branchiostoma (Amphioxus) 

 in Mississippi and Louisiana. Science 115 (2976): 48. 



Hubbs, Carl L. 



1922. A list of the lancelets of the world with diagnoses 

 of five new species. Occ. Pap. Univ. Michigan 105: 

 1-16. 



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