Life 



The plants and animals in the ocean are 

 obviously controlled by the nature of their 

 water media, but less obviously the compo- 

 sition of the water itself is a function of 

 withdrawal and return of elements by 

 organisms. Plants and animals are inter- 

 related to a certain extent with topography 

 but far more with sediments to which they 

 contribute waste and skeketal materials and 

 on which, in many instances, they draw for 

 food and shelter. Since the sediments are 

 closely related to physiography, the plants 

 and animals are best considered in groupings 

 according to physiographic environment. 



General 



Plants and animals that live in the ocean 

 are too numerous and varied and have too 

 complex a relationship with each other to be 

 well described in only a single chapter. 

 Even an entire book on the plants and ani- 

 mals would be inadequate. General works 

 on organisms living in deep water are 

 sketchy in coverage of kinds of organisms 

 (Sverdrup, Johnson, and Fleming, 1942, 

 chapters 9, 16, 18, and 19; Alice, Emerson, 

 Park, Park, and Schmidt, 1949) or are based 

 on other oceanic areas with little informa- 

 tion pertinent to local waters (Zenkevich, 

 1947; Ekman, 1953). General books on 

 plants and animals of the intertidal areas 



are more numerous. Applying largely to 

 southern California are three books that are 

 concerned for the most part with general 

 taxonomy and physiology of seashore ani- 

 mals (Johnson and Snook, 1935; MacGinitie 

 and MacGinitie, 1949; Fitch, 1953). Another 

 by Light, Smith, Pitelka, Abbot, and Weesner 

 (1954) covers much the same field for the 

 San Francisco region. The most useful 

 book on intertidal ecology is one by Ricketts 

 and Calvin, recently revised by Hedgpeth 

 (1952), which is based on Monterey Bay. 

 For algae, mostly intertidal, the only gen- 

 eral book (Smith, 1944) is also for the Mon- 

 terey Bay region, although Dawson (1945, 

 1946, 1956) prepared a check hst booklet for 

 algae of San Diego County and other sum- 

 mary descriptions. These various books 

 represent a very incomplete treatment of 

 plants and animals for southern California, 

 and they are particularly incomplete from 

 an ecological point of view. Even for pre- 

 cise taxonomic purposes it is necessary to 

 refer to the hundreds of published technical 

 papers on particular groups of animals and 

 plants; some of these papers also contain a 

 little information on ecology. 



For these reasons it is probably worth- 

 while to point out here some of the relation- 

 ships of organisms to the known water and 

 bottom characteristics off southern Califor- 

 nia, to indicate geological relationships, and 

 to list some of the more detailed appropri- 



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