CLIMATE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF MARINE ANIMALS 



307 



differ widely from season to season, it does have 

 tlie advantage, as an index to long-term fluctua- 

 tions, of smoothing out the short-period ups and 

 downs that loom large when individual months 

 are compared for different years. 



Table 5. — Mean air temperatures for warmest month of 

 year at Boston to nearest degree, by periods, 1922-53 



(Temperatures in °F.] 



Table 6. — Mean water temperatures in Boston Harbor to 

 nearest degree, by periods, 1922-53 



(Temperatures in °F.| 



I Mean for period 1942-45 based on 3 years only, lacking data for 1944. 



Water temperatures, similarly, have trended 

 upward unmistakably since a cold period in the 

 early 1940's at Eastport, a short distance within 

 Passamaquoddy Bay (tributary to the lower Bay 

 of Fundy), both for the warmest season and for 

 the coldest (table 7), by about the same amount 

 as at Boston (3°-4°). A mean of 51.9° (50.1°- 

 53.8°) for the 2 warmest months combined, for 

 the period 1930-41, contrasts with a mean of 

 53.7° (52.1°-54.6°) for 1949-53. 



We also read in the annual report of the Fisheries 

 Research Board of Canada for 1951 (p. 34) that 



Table 1 .■ — Mean water temperatures for coldest and warmest 

 months at Eastport, Maine, by 2-year periods, 1930-53 



(Temperatures in "F.] 



surface water temperatures at St. Andrews, 

 farther up the Passamaquoddy Bay "have shown 

 a fairly definite upward trend for the past ten 

 years, with temperatures in 1951 the highest in 

 thirty years' records." Lauzier (1954, p. 7) also 

 has recently remarked "that the waters of the 

 (St. Andrews) area are undergoing a general 

 warming since 1940." The ups and downs from 

 year to year have not been great enough to mask 

 this warming on Lauzier's graph of mean annual 

 temperatures (p. 8, fig. 1), although the difference 

 from one year to the next has been about as wide 

 in extreme cases (up to about 3.5°) as the general 

 upward trend has been from the early 1940's to 

 the early 1950's. That this warming trend has 

 extended eastward and northward to the waters 

 along the outer coast of Nova Scotia and to the 

 Magdalen shallows in the southern side of the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence is apparent from Lauzier's 

 graph of mean yearly temperatures at Sambro 

 Lightship, off Halifax, Nova Scotia, and from 

 his tables of quarterly averages of surface tem- 

 peratures there and at the Magdalen Islands, 

 during the periods 1940-44 and 1949-53 (Lauzier 

 1952, p. 6, fig. 1; 1954, pp. 9 and 10, tables II and 

 III). 



COMPARISON OF TEMPERATURES FOR 1953-54 

 AND 1912-26 



March-April 



Since a colder period during the early 1940's, 

 water temperatures have so clearly averaged some 

 2° to 4° higher at Boston Harbor, at Eastport, 

 Maine, and at St. Andrews, N. B., than they had 

 previous to about 1940-42 (p. 306) as to make the 

 assumption reasonable that a corresponding tem- 

 perature change had taken place offshore. Com- 

 parison of the bathythermograph records taken by 

 the Albatross III during March 1953 with the 

 temperatures recorded during our late winter and 

 early spring cruises of 1913 to 1925 (p. 302) corrob- 

 orate this assumption, at least for the upper 150 

 meters. 



The water may not have been significantly 

 warmer at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay and 

 out in the basin in the early spring of 1953 than 

 at tluit season in the warmer of the years included 

 within the earlier period (table 8). The difference 

 between readings — 1.5° to 3° higher at neighboring 

 localities on March 30-31, 1953, than on March 5, 

 1921 — may be no greater than can be charged 



