380 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1923 



surface at 9 or 10 o'clock at night are not quite alike. Most of 

 them are the same, but in the deeper haul there are to be found 

 various large shrimplike crustaceans, mostly bright red in color, 

 strange jellyfishes of a deep red, and different sorts of sooty black 

 fishes, some armed with enormous teeth and most ferocious in ap- 

 pearance, others long and eellike, with snipelike jaws, and others 

 looking more like ordinary fishes but with rows of brilliant phos- 

 phorescent lights along their sides; quite commonly there are also 

 little distorted silvery fishes, also with lights, and sometimes little 

 black sharks from 6 or 8 inches to a foot in length. 



These creatures are representatives of the deep oceanic fauna 

 which remains below the illuminated upper layers of the sea, feed- 

 ing upon the surface animals when these descend in the daytime 

 to escape the sunlight, and upon the smaller animals about them. 



The oceanic plants can only live to a maximum depth of about 

 650 feet, and at that depth only in the most transparent water; 

 but the animals which feed upon them form the food of other 

 animals which live deeper, in perpetual shade, and these again 

 furnish food for other, though fewer, animals which live still farther 

 down, in perpetual night. The oceanic animals, largest as well as 

 smallest at the surface, extend downward for an indefinite distance, 

 becoming less and less varied and gradually scarcer and more uni- 

 form in size; probably, indeed, no level of the sea is entirely with- 

 out them. 



Well out of sight, but probably in the twilight zone where food 

 is most abundant and conditions are practically the same in all 

 the oceans except in the extreme north and south, live giant squids 

 and cuttles of several kinds, the largest, occasionally found floating 

 in a dying or dead condition in the autumn on the fishing banks 

 and sometimes in other parts of the sea, reaching a total length 

 of at least 55 feet, with the body 20 feet long and 12 feet in circum- 

 ference and the eye opening 7 by 9 inches ; in one individual meas- 

 ured the tentacular arms were 37 feet in length. In October, 1875, 

 between 25 and 30 of these giant squid were found by the vessels 

 of the Gloucester fishing fleet on the Grand Banks and cut up and 

 used for bait. The schooner Howard, Capt. J. W. Collins, alone 

 secured 5 of these, which were mostly from 10 to 15 feet in length, 

 not including the arms. The schooner Tragabigzanda, Captain Mal- 

 lory, secured 3 from 8 to 12 feet long in one afternoon. Probably 

 as many were found by the ships from other towns as by those 

 from Gloucester. 



The famous sea serpent can from most accounts be identified as 

 one of these great squid in a dying condition, somewhat distorted 

 by an active imagination. The head with the frilled neck, so com- 

 monly described, is the tail of the squid lifted above the water. 



