CHAPTEE III. 



PELAGIC FAUNA. 



The provision whereby such little fishes find in the ocean 

 food suited to their capacities is one of the most striking 

 features in nature, but it has only recently been carefully 

 investigated'- It is a notion no longer tenable that during the 

 winter and spring the sea, to a large extent, is devoid of the 

 wealth of pelagic life — so characteristic of the summer months 

 just as it is of the genial waters of the tropics. For many 

 years, however, it has been known that a vast abundance of 

 minute life of all kinds is present throughout the entire year — 

 and from the surface to the bottom. Moreover, during the 

 warmer months a constant succession of young forms rises from 

 the eggs both of the sedentary and creeping animals on the 

 bottom to the surface — where they sport in the summer sun, 

 undergo certain changes, and again descend as they assume the 

 form of the adult. The pelagic young food-fishes — swimming 

 freely in the ocean — thus have a double chance at them — first 

 in their very early stage as they rise, and again in their larger 



1 Vide "La faune pSlagique du Golfe de Marseille," par Gourret, Ann. du 

 Musee d'hist. nat. de Marseille, ii., 1884. The pelagic fauna of our shores in 

 relation to the nourishment of the young food-fishes, Ann. Nat. Hist., Feb. 

 1887. Also Hensen and Mobius in Fiinfter Bericht der Kommission zur wiss. 

 c&c, der deutschen Meere, Berlin, 1887, pp. 1 and 109. Recently various 

 observations have been made on the Pelagic Fauna, perhaps the most im- 

 portant being those of Prof. Hensen in the Plankton Expedition of 1889, 

 of Prof. Haeckel in his Plankton- Studien, of Mr Garstang on the Pelagic 

 Fauna of Plymouth; and "The Sources of Marine Food," James J. Peck, 

 U.S. Fish Com. 1895. 



