Abstract
THERE still remains a large field for the A discovery of new forms of animal life in the deeper layers of the ocean water masses. There, pelagic life is not concentrated at one level, but has a vertical range of many hundreds of metres in which to roam as well as thousands of square miles horizontally. The larger animals thus tend to become comparatively sparsely distributed. To sample this deep-living population, great quantities of water must be filtered, and it is only to be expected that the recent introduction of large pelagic nets would bring a considerable extension to our knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this better emphasised than in the study of the deep-sea angler fishes of the sub-order Ceratioidea; as a result of the examination of the collection of these fishes made on the world voyage of the Dana in 1928-30 under the late Prof. Johannes Schmidt, our knowledge has been amplified and brought up to date by Dr. C. Tate Regan and Miss Ethelwynn Trewavas. Although a systematic revision of the group was made by Dr. Tate Regan in 1926, the addition of new species and collection of new specimens has been so great that the authors have found it necessary to make a further revision. In the former report the number of species was 60 while now 158 species are recognised. Previous collections had consisted, to a considerable extent, of specimens less than one inch in length which had been assigned to those known species which they most nearly resembled; it is now shown that, among the Oneirodidae, the adult characters may be assumed at a very small size.
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R., F. Deep-Sea Angler Fishes. Nature 132, 535 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132535a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132535a0