8. -ON SOME LAKE SUPERIOR ENTOMOSTRACA. 



By S. A. Forbes. 

 (With 4 plates.) 



It seems hardly creditable to American zoology, or to the present tend- 

 ency of zoological research among us, that the minute animal life of 

 the greatest body ot fresh water on the globe should be less fully known 

 than that of scores of insignificant European lakes, or even of many a 

 wayside pool. While our students eagerly engage, often at arm's length 

 and under almost prohibitory disadvantages, in merely imitative work 

 on the problems most prominent in the laboratories of the Old World, we 

 leave untouched, at our very doors, virgin fields of research which must 

 deeply stir the envy of the active group of zoologists who have lately 

 enriched science with a mass of new and highly significant knowledge 

 of the lake fauna of Europe. 



It is especially with the hope of calling more general attention to the 

 animal life of our own larger lakes that I present here a preliminary 

 description of the product of a few hauls of the surface net made in 

 August, 1889, from piers and breakwaters, during a hurried trip along 

 the south shore of Lake Superior. The only points from which it was 

 possible for me to make even these imperfect collections were the little 

 town of l'Anse (at the head of Keweenaw Bay), Marquette, and White 

 Fish Point. I improved also a brief opportunity to use the net from a 

 skiff in Lake Michigamme, in Marquette County, a few miles south of 

 the great lake, with which its waters are connected only by way of the 

 Menominee River and Lake Michigan. 



The only published information on theEntoraostraca of Lake Superior 

 is that given by Prof. S. I. Smith, of Yaie, fifteen years ago, in the Report 

 of the U. S. Fish Commissioner for 1874,* and there but four species of 

 the free swimming forms of these minute Crustacea are positively 

 identified. Concerning the entomostracau fauna of the Great Lakes in 

 general, we have brief papers by Professor Birge t and myself J on species 



"Sketch of the Invertebrate Fauna of Lake Superior, p. 690. 



t " Notes on Cladocera." Trans. Wis. Acad. Sci., 1876-'77, p. 77. " Notes on Crus- 

 tacea in Chicago Water Supply, with Remarks on the Formatiou of the Carapace." 

 Chicago Med. Jour. & Examiner, xvi, pp. 584-590 (Dec, 1881). 



X "On Some Entomostraca of Lake Michigan and Adjacent Waters." Amer. Nat., 

 xvi, pp. 537, 640. Q1 



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