Some Experiments on Rate of Growth in a Polar Region (Spitsbergen) and in England

Abstract

IN a recent paper (Journal Mar. Biol. Assoc., vol. 12, 1920, p. 355) attention was directed by me to the lack of critical evidence bearing on the theories offered to explain (a) the abundance of life in polar regions, and (b) the occurrence of several generations of a species living side by side in polar waters. Murray and Loeb and others have suggested that an explanation of these phenomena may be found in a greatly retarded rate of growth which, it is postulated, must occur in the low temperatures prevailing in these regions. The present writer urges (a) that we know nothing about the rate of growth of organisms in polar regions, and (b) that the kind of metabolism of animals in polar regions—and in deep-sea situations—is not necessarily the same as that in temperate or tropical regions. A given organism, may be regarded as a machine, but it is perhaps derogatory to the kind of machine one is dealing with to assume that other life-machines existing under totally different conditions are necessarily governed by identical applications of the same laws; for example, it does not necessarily follow that because the rate of metabolism in tropical or temperate animals falls off rapidly with decreasing temperatures approaching 0°C., that metabolism in polar animals is necessarily of the slow rate of temperate animals at polar sea-temperatures. No reason has yet been shown that adaptation of metabolism cannot occur; on the contrary, there is every reason to expect such adaptation.