FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 



489 



with great speed, opening the way with its sharp- 

 pointed snout. It often does this above low- 

 water mark at high tide to await the return of the 

 tide. We have often seen them vanish with 

 surprising rapidity when alarmed by clam diggers, 

 and we cannot improve on Goode's 37 account of 

 seeing "a great section of the beach" in Province- 

 town harbor become "alive with dancing forms 

 of dozens of these agile fishes" when he stuck his 

 clam-hoe into the sand. It has been suggested 

 that they spend a large part of the time so buried, 

 and that their sudden appearances and disap- 

 pearances are to be explained thus, rather than 

 as evidence of their wanderings or migrations. 

 It is not known whether they follow this habit 

 only in shoal water where they come under 

 direct observation, or whether they also burrow 

 into deeper bottoms. If the burrowing habit is 

 for refuge, it is not always successful, for, as 

 Smitt 38 remarks, porpoises have been seen rooting 

 them out of the sand. 



In Scandinavian waters sand eels feed on all 

 sorts of small marine animals, but chiefly on small 

 Crustacea, especially on copepods, and on fish fry, 

 including their own kind. Worms have also been 

 found commonly in the stomachs of sand eels, 

 but it is not likely that they catch these while 

 burrowing, as some writers have suggested. 



The sand eel plays a very important role in the 

 economy of northern seas as food for larger ani- 

 mals. Finback whales devour them greedily when 

 they find them in abundance, as happened in 

 Cape Cod Bay in June 1880, when launce ap- . 

 peared in swarms early in the month followed by 

 finbacks a few days later. Porpoises, too, find 

 them a staple article of food, and sundry preda- 

 ceous fish such as cod, haddock, halibut, silver 

 hake, salmon, mackerel, striped bass, and blue- 

 fish. When sand eels are fleeing from their pur- 

 suers especially from the silver hake, which does 

 not hesitate to follow them up on the sand, they 

 often strand in such numbers as to cover the flats. 



Sand eels' noses are so sharp that when they 

 are swallowed by cod, and perhaps by other fish, 

 they sometimes work right through the stomachs 

 and into the body cavities of their captors, to 

 become encysted in the body wall. 



The spawning of the American sand eel has not 

 been observed so far as we can learn. 39 



Ripe specimens of the European species (to- 

 bianus), both male and female, have been taken 

 throughout the year, a phenomenon that has 

 given rise to widely differing views as to its spawn- 

 ing season. But the chief production of its eggs 

 takes place in autumn and early winter, at least 

 in the southern part of the North Sea, as Ehren- 

 baum 40 demonstrated, both by dredging them in 

 large numbers, and by the fact that its larvae are 

 extremely abundant there from January to March, 

 but have seldom been taken at other seasons. 



The occurrence of larvae suggests that the sea- 

 son is about the same for the American form in 

 the Gulf of Maine. Thus the Fish Hawk towed 

 numbers of larval launce (identified by R. A. 

 Goffin of the Bureau of Fisheries and by Mrs. C. 

 J. Fish) near Provincetown and in Cape Cod Bay, 

 during December, January, and February, 1924- 

 1925, evidence both that this part of the Gulf of 

 Maine (where adults are abundant) is the site of 

 considerable reproduction, and that spawning 

 commences as early as November there. Fry 

 have been taken in March at Woods Hole while 

 the Albatross towed a number of larvae of 11 

 to 17 mm. on the western part of Georges 

 Bank on February 22, 1920. It seems that the 

 spawning season is progressively later, however, to 

 the northward, for we took larvae only a few 

 days old (7 to 8 mm. long), with the yolk still 

 showing, off Newburyport, Mass., on March 4 in 

 1921, while the Canadian Fisheries Expedition of 

 1915 obtained an abundance of slightly older 

 stages (7 to 15 mm. long) off the southeast coast 

 of Nova Scotia in May. 



Evidently the sand eel breeds successfully 

 throughout the more northern part of its range, 

 for its larvae have been found, widespread, over 

 the Nova Scotian Banks, in the Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence northward nearly to the Strait of Belle 

 Isle, throughout the Grand Bank region, off the 

 east coast of Newfoundland and off the outer coast 



« Fish. Ind. D. S.; Sect. 1, 1884, p. 244. 

 " Scandinavian Fishes, vol. 2, 1895, p. 579. 



'• Hind (Fish. Comm. Halifax, 1877, Pt. 2, p. 7) describes the launce in the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence as "depositing their large reddish-colored ova on the 

 sand between high and low water.*' This account, however, is widely at 

 variance with the spawning habits of their European representative (Am- 

 modytes tobianus) and with the seasonal occurrence of their larvae; and was 

 probably borrowed from the larger European sand eel (Ammodytes lanceo- 

 latus). 



« Wissenschaftliche Meeresuntersuchungen, Helgoland, Neue Folge, vol. 

 6, 1904, p. 184. 



