PELAGIC FAUNA 



By P. L. Kramp 



Animals inhabit not only the sea-bed but the entire mass of water from 

 bottom to surface and from shore to shore. The rich variety of pelagic 

 fauna, as the creatures which live between the surface and the deep-sea 

 floor are called, embraces a range of remarkable and frequently very 

 beautiful zoological forms adapted, in many peculiar and extremely 

 interesting ways, either to a life of active swimming ("nekton") or to 

 floating and drifting with the current ("plankton"). 



Pelagic organisms are of immense importance in the economy of the 

 sea. In the upper water layers, the "epipelagic" region which is reached by 

 sunlight, there is plant life — the immense quantity of microscopic plank- 



Using its tail-fin as a propeller, the flying-fish leaps out of the water and glides on the extended 

 pectoral fins. 



