293 DISCOVERY REPORTS 



the winter ice cleared away, the earUest surface product of this hypothetical spawning, that is, the 

 Calyptopis stages, spread by January all the way round Antarctica and not, as they are (p. 310, 

 Fig. 74), confined, still for all practical purposes exclusively, to the western Weddell drift. 



jfaniiary-February. The January-February egg chart (Fig. 65) again seems to emphasise, even 

 if only in a minor degree, the importance of the north Graham Land shelf region as a spawning 

 ground and gives some indication too that the shallow water associated with the South Orkney-South 

 Sandwich Islands ridge may also be a region where the eggs are laid. The minor concentrations of eggs 

 recorded in the north Graham Land area, six in all of which only four are plotted, were all obtained 

 in February. There are no vertical observations in these waters in January. Elsewhere, apart from two 

 notable instances to the contrary of which more will be said presently, our vertical hauls above 1000 or 

 1500 m. provide no indication that any major or widespread oceanic spawning has occurred. The South 

 Georgia area with its heavy coverage is barren and the whole circumpolar sea down to the deepest 

 levels^ we have probed is either equally barren or at best carrying only negligible numbers of eggs. 

 There is a conspicuously barren area extending into very high latitudes in the Pacific sector though 

 here the East Wind drift was poorly sampled between 90° and 140° W. Such very small occurrences as 

 there are elsewhere are confined exclusively to high latitudes in the East Wind drift and again, in 

 some measure of concentration as in December, to the western reaches of the Weddell stream. 

 Although, however, the East Wind occurrences are negligible this again it seems must be attributed 

 to our wholesale failure to sample the main mass of the eggs which in these high latitudes must by 

 now have been laid. For when we turn to the distribution of the early deep living larvae (p. 301, 

 Fig. 70), the distribution in other words of a very recent product of hatching, it becomes at 

 once clear that spawning has already taken place in the coastal or near coastal waters of this west- 

 going stream, beginning on a reduced scale in January and reaching major proportions by about the 

 middle of the following month. 



The very large haul of eggs in Weddell East and the other moderately large one in the East Wind 



drift on the northern outskirts of the Ross Sea are, as already mentioned, the only instances of what 



could be described as major spawning in or over deep oceanic water we have encountered. The Ross 



Sea haul at Station 1283 in late February consisted of 263 eggs disposed vertically in a 1000 m. water 



column as follows: 



Depth (m.) Eggs 



Although not a very large haul- it must be regarded as representing a clear, if possibly exceptional, 

 instance where spawning had taken place in the surface layers over deep oceanic water (3950 m.) and 

 far away from land. A long way from any coast, however, though Station 1283 undoubtedly is, it is 

 perhaps worth noting that it lies at no great distance from shallow soundings, the 750 fathom line, 

 as far as our imperfect knowledge of the bottom topography here permits us to judge, being no more 

 than 70 odd miles away to the west. 



The larger haul in Weddell East presents a more difficult problem. The sounding there was 



^ In general our deepest vertical net was fished between 1000 and 750 m., but there are many instances, particularly along 

 the meridian of Greenwich, where the 1500-1000 m. layer was also covered. 



^ Compare, for instance, the relatively enormous gatherings of larvae (p. 90, Tables 13 and 15) obtained at Stations 1138, 

 1328 and others. 



