202 THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE SEA [PART 11 



those of temperate and arctic seas — these are the White Sea, the 

 Icelandic waters, the Lofoten cod-fisheries, the Newfoundland 

 fisheries, and the rich fishing grounds of the North Sea, and off 

 the north and west coasts of Scotland. The cold seas of arctic 

 and antarctic regions are the chosen haunts of the largest 

 creatures that exist on the earth ; and from the earliest recorded 

 times man has sought these inhospitable climes for the whales and 

 seals. Many fishes, such as the sharks and halibuts inhabiting the 

 cold seas, are among the largest of the elasmobranch and teleost 

 orders. Nowhere are sea birds so numerous as in polar waters. 

 The benthic fauna and flora are also most luxuriant. Schimper^ 

 tells us that the macroscopic vegetation of the tropics is less 

 abundant, and is less rich in species, than that of the temperate 

 seas. The algal flora of the Arctic, though less rich in species, 

 and covering a smaller area than that of the tropics, surpasses in 

 density that of all other seas with the exception of the Antarctic 

 Ocean. Kroyer found an abundance of life such as he had never 

 seen surpassed, and seldom equalled, in Belsund, in Spitzbergen 

 (77° N. Lat.). The sea bottom was, without exaggeration, covered 

 with ascidians and molluscs. The seals and sea birds which he 

 dissected had their stomachs full of crustaceans. Amphipods 

 were so abundant that in one night the carcase of a seal was 

 entirely cleaned and reduced to a skeleton. A basket containing 

 the head of a shark was sunk to 75 fathoms and when hauled in 

 two hours it contained six quarts of amphipods, though as it came 

 up a cloud of these Crustacea issued from it like a swarm of 

 bees and were left behind. K. E. von Baer, in 1864, thought it 

 doubtful whether, in the polar seas, life w^as not more abundant 

 than in the much greater area of the equatorial ocean. One 

 obtains a striking picture of the wealth of marine life from 

 Darwin's account of the biology of Tierra del Fuego-. The 

 inhospitable and desolate land contrasted strongly with the sea. 

 " If we turn from the land to the sea," he says, " we shall find the 

 latter as abundantly stocked with living creatures as the former 

 is poorly so.... There is one marine production, which from its 

 importance is worthy of a particular history. It is the kelp or 



^ PJlanzengeographie auf physiologischer Grundlage, Jena, 1898. 

 2 Journal of Researches. 



