456 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 6 



The old sea wall of Nelson's day, still standing, is a marvelous place 

 for collecting invertebrates, mobile as well as sessile, and many small 

 fishes, too. At night, with flashlight and long-handled dip net, night 

 prowlers, which seldom if ever leave the crevices in which they hide 

 by day, fall easy prey to the collector. Here the long-clawed, red- 

 banded Stenopus can be caught in quantity, one specimen at a time. 

 While Chace and the writer worked over the seashore, the reefs, the 

 harbor piling, and an old wreck, the captain successfully dived for 

 more of the sandy, bottom-dwelling anemones and their associated 

 crustaceans. In addition to the snapping shrimp, Alpheus armatics, 

 that he had discovered lurking among the tentacles of the sea anemones 

 at Marigot Bay, he found here another species with similar habits, a 

 hippolytid shrimp, Thor floridanus, and also a small red mysid shrimp 

 of which he got several specimens under the same conditions. 



The botanist and entomologist were otherwise engaged. They 

 always sought out the higher elevations of most of the islands visited, 

 for the higher one got, and the farther from civilization, the more 

 natural and unspoiled the flora and fauna. The main range of hills 

 on Antigua bears an imposing name — the Shekerley Mountains — 

 although only in a few places does the elevation exceed 1,000 feet. 

 There remain a few patches of native vegetation on these hills, but 

 in the main the whole of the island has been cleared at one time or 

 another. On Boggy Peake, the highest on Antigua, 1,314 feet, and 

 later on Falmouth Peak ("Sugarloaf"), the collecting was varied. 

 Much of the hill area is clothed with a thorny evergreen bush con- 

 sisting of many species of the legume family; such genera of other 

 families as Guettarda, Capparis, Cordia, and Rapanea are represented 

 among the small trees. Several species of epiphytic bromeliads and 

 peperomias thrive in spite of the scanty precipitation. At lower 

 elevations, and especially on the dry hills near English Harbour, a 

 predominant plant is the tall yellow-flowered Agave obducta, endemic 

 to Antigua and the nearby island of Barbuda. This lowland vegeta- 

 tion is characterized by a preponderance of thorny plants, not only 

 such horrendous cacti as Opuntia triacantha and O. dillenii, but 

 thorny legumes, thorny Verbenaceae, thorny Rubiaceae, and thorny 

 Euphorbiaceae. Dr. Clarke and Dr. Smith agreed that, in pursuit of 

 their specialties on the hills near English Harbour, stout clothes and 

 a forgiving disposition were prerequisites. 



The low-lying, seldom visited, reef-girt island of Barbuda was next 

 on our itinerary because we wanted to see there the spiny lobster 

 faggot fishery, about which the captain had told us. To the island's 

 treacherous reefs are credited perhaps more wrecks than any other 

 island in the West Indies. But the island is nevertheless blessed with 

 a large, almost landlocked lagoon. An opening to the north permits 

 the shallow draft, usually Antigua-bound, sloops to make their way 



