SEA-FISHERIES LABORATORY. 117 



hatched in a glass jar at Piel a few days after the catch was 

 landed. It was suggested in the XIII Annual Keport that the 

 eggs might belong to the halibut, as it is the only British fish 

 that spawned an apparently pelagic egg approaching the size 

 given, and which was not enclosed in a ribbon-like mass. 

 Very little was known about halibut eggs at that time, but 

 various investigators have since described them. Professor 

 E. Ehrenbaum in his report " Eier und Larven von Fischen, 

 andere Eier und Cysten " in " Nordisches Plankton," Bd. I, 

 page 179, describes the eggs as 3'1 to 3*8 millimetres in diameter, 

 with a homogeneous yolk, without oil globule, and with a 

 tough egg-shell. It is evident, therefore, that the large eggs 

 from the Clyde cannot be halibut as they had a distinct oil 

 globule. Some time after the illustrations were published I 

 examined living eggs and larvae of the angler fish (Lophius 

 piscatorius, Linn), and am now fairly certain that the eggs 

 supposed to be halibut really belonged to the angler-fish, and 

 had by some means become separated from the characteristic 

 gelatinous ribbon. The occurrence of such isolated eggs of 

 the angler-fish appears to be very rare, as I have not met with 

 them in the plankton again until 1913. A sample taken off 

 Port Erin on March 10th, 1913, by Professor Herdman in his 

 S. Y. " Runa," contained one of these eggs. It measured 

 2-74 millimetres in diameter. The oil globule was yellowish 

 in colour and measured 0-59 millimetre in diameter. The egg 

 is rather larger than Ehrenbaum describes on page 47 of his 

 work in Nordisches Plankton. He gives the size of the egg 

 of the angler- fish as 2-13 to 2-36 millimetres in diameter, and 

 the oil-globule 0-53 to 0-57 millimetre in diameter. No doubt 

 there will be a considerable amount of variation both in the 

 size of the egg and of the oil-globule, similar to what is found 

 in the eggs of other fishes. 



The following is a summary of the occurrence and 

 distribution of the eggs in the plankton collected by the steamer 



