DEPARTMENT OF MARINE BIOLOGY. 193 



become extinct in the Atlantic. We do not venture to assert that some 

 such dying out of species may still be progressing in the tropical 

 Atlantic, but some general cause seems to be producing a decline in the 

 shoal-water fauna over the whole West Indian, Bahaman, and Florida 

 region. Possibly the decided reduction in the numbers of fishes, etc., 

 of commercial use may have had an indirect effect in causing the 

 reduction of other forms. 



When the Director first visited the Tortugas in 1897, on practically 

 every night during the breeding-season from May until August at least 

 one female Loggerhead turtle crawled up upon the sands to lay its eggs; 

 but in 1921 not a single turtle crawled upon Loggerhead Key. Fisher- 

 men living in 1897 told me that in about 1860 as many as 40 turtles 

 would sometimes crawl and be turned over upon this island in a single 

 night, and that after turning them it was the custom to let them all die 

 in the hot sun. In common with all other valuable commercial 

 resources of Florida, the extermination of the sea-turtles has been 

 phenomenal and quite in keeping with the ruin of the sponge fisheries, 

 once the chief source of revenue for Key West, as well as the extermi- 

 nation of the most beautiful forms of bird life, such as the flamingo, 

 roseate spoonbill, and crested egret. 



The destruction of the littoral element of marine life will probably 

 be hastened appreciably by the coming of the oil-burning steamer. 

 Only three j^ears ago the harbor water of Key West was remarkably 

 pure, due to the absence of city sewage ; and the piling of the docks was 

 a source of an abundant marine life. Now everything between tides 

 is thickly covered with a mass of black crude oil and the marine life 

 between tides has disappeared. Even the remote beaches of the 

 Tortugas are beginning to be flecked with this oil. 



These conditions indicate that marine laboratories for research 

 should be regarded as temporary establishments. Indeed, it has been 

 the history of every laboratory that the progressive contamination of 

 water in its neighborhood has been a source of constantly increasing 

 embarrassment. Such contamination forced the abandonment of 

 Professor A. Agassiz's once prosperous laboratory at Newport. The 

 Naples laboratory was obliged to construct a branch station at Ischia 

 in order to give opportunity for phj'siological work such as could no 

 longer be performed in the sewage-laden water in the neighborhood of 

 Naples. The great English laboratory at Plymouth and our own 

 laboratory at Woods Hole are now forced to go far afield for many 

 forms once abundant in the immediate neighborhood. In other words, 

 the Department of Marine Biology should be looked upon as an agency 

 for the study of problems of the oceans rather than as a fixed station 

 at Tortugas, Florida. In fact, studies commenced at Tortugas have 

 frequently led us to the Pacific for their logical continuance. 



