362 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES 



company with these medusae, and young cod have also been found associating with 

 them. We have found young haddock in company with Cyanea on Georges Bank 

 on one occasion (July 23, 1916, stations 10347 and 10348), as has Huntsman (1922, 

 p. 20) in the St. Andrews region in the Bay of Fundy, but Cyanea is so closely re- 

 stricted to the neighborhood of the coast and to shoal water in the Gulf of Maine 

 that it can hardly play as important a role there as in the northeastern Atlantic and 

 North Sea region, unless it be over Georges Bank. 



Young butterfish (Poronotus triacantlius) also commonly shelter under Cyanea 

 off the coasts of southern New England (Goode, 1884), but they have not been seen 

 following this habit north of Cape Cod. 



The large Cyanea must be extremely destructive to copepods and other plank- 

 tonic animals, which may usually be found entangled among its curtainlike lips. 



Aurelia aurita (Linng) 



The genus Aurelia is probably more nearly cosmopolitan in the coastal waters of 

 all the great oceans than any other neritic medusa, for it is known from Arctic to 

 Tropic latitudes, both in the Atlantic and in the Pacific, as well as from the Indian 

 Ocean. Several supposedly distinct "species" of Aurelia have been described, but 

 it becomes increasingly probable, as one collection after another is examined, that 

 most of these names have actually been given to variants of one wide-ranging Aurelia — 

 the A. aurita. This, I believe, is certainly true of the Amelias that inhabit 

 north European seas, on the one hand, and the American side of the Atlantic from 

 Labrador to the West Indies, Cuba, and Gulf of Mexico, on the other. It still 

 remains an open question whether the Aurelias of west Greenland, the northern 

 shores of Alaska, Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, and northern Japan, which are 

 separable from the typical aurita of boreal-Temperate and Tropic seas by a very com- 

 plex anastomosis of their canal systems, are actually a distinct species or merely a 

 variety of aurita. 1 



The multitudes of this large white jellyfish which annually appear along the 

 coasts of New England, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia are familiar to every fisher- 

 man, yachtsman, and summer visitor and have often been commented on. 2 Indeed, 

 it is lucky they are not venomous to man, like their larger relative Cyanea, or bathers 

 would be driven from our beaches during the Aurelia season. It is characteristic of 

 Aurelia to appear suddenly in lines or windrows, often miles in length, as where two 

 tidal currents meet. On such occasions, in calm weather, their shadowy forms can be 

 seen shimmering as far down in the water as the eye can penetrate, while the white 

 genital rings stand out conspicuously on the translucent bodies of those near the 

 surface. They are often cast up on the shore in heavy weather, to lie in piles. When 

 swarming, it is not unusual to find variants from the normal type. 3 



To illustrate how generally Aurelia occurs along the shores of the Gulf of Maine 

 (fig. 100) , I may note that we have encountered it in multitudes in Yarmouth Harbor 



■The Interrelationships of the various Aurelias have been discussed recently by Mayer (1910), Kramp (1913b), and by the 

 author (1913, p. 98). 



' L. Agassiz (1862, pp. 75 to 78) has given a graphic account of the habits of Aurelia in Massachusetts waters. 



' I find in my notes that on the evening of July 23, 1912, we "saw one with seven, one with six, and two with five genital 

 rings," the normal number being four, while watching them float by the Grampus lying at anchor at Kittery, Me. 



