William Ringrose Gelston Atkins was appointed Head of the Department of General Physiology at the Plymouth Laboratory in February 1921 at the age of 36 having already at Trinity College, Dublin, applied widely the methods of physics and chemistry to the problems of biology, particularly botany. He was very well equipped to study the physics and chemistry of sea water as an environment for marine life. He served with great distinction at Plymouth, apart from the years of the Second World War, until he retired from the staff in March 1955 and enjoyed only four years of leisure before his death on 4 April 1959.

Twenty years ago the Plymouth Laboratory investigated the spawning of mackerel and pilchard in the Celtic Sea. The physical background for their work, which the late Dr G. A. Steven and Mr P. G. Corbin sought, could not be provided since waters with similar temperatures and salinities evidently had very different physical and biological histories.

The physical oceanography of the shallow seas south-west of the British Isles ismuch influenced by the exchanges of waters around headlands between neighbouring areas of the sea. These are

For a third of a century many and varied studies on sea water have been concentrated upon a single accessible shallow-water station in the English Channel, EI, supplemented by more extensive excursions usually designed to test working hypotheses. This concentration of effort has been richly rewarded. In deep-water oceanography a similar approach is appropriate; a standard station, ‘Cavall’ has therefore been selected in the north-eastern Bay of Biscay in 4700 m of water at lat. 46° 30' N., long. 8° 00' W., nominal, a position worked by the Danish Research Vessel ‘Dana’ in 1922 and 1930. It is not only the nearest deep water position to Plymouth but it has best possible coverage by the Decca Navigator system. For our experimental programme it is essential that the station positions be maintained and repeated precisely. To achieve this a working Decca chartlet (Fig. 1) on a scale of 1:20,000 has been prepared for each station from a portion of the Admiralty Decca Lattice chart no. L 1104. On this a circle of radius one mile is inscribed. Throughout operations the ship is maintained within this circle by stopping work when necessary and steaming back on Decca co-ordinates towards the centre, or beyond to pre-compensate expected drift.

The vertical distribution of chlorophyll in the sea generally shows a maximum concentration at a depth which may vary from at or just below the surface, to near or below the bottom of the euphoric zone. The easiest distributions to explain are those where the maximum chlorophyll concentration is at or very near the surface. These are found when a population is photosynthesizing actively during the first stages of an outburst, and the distribution corresponds roughly with the change with depth of the photosynthetic rate (Steele, 1957). However, these form a small proportion of observations, probably because outbursts are usually restricted to comparatively short periods of time. The more usual distributions show a maximum in the chlorophyll concentrations well below the surface and below the depth of maximum photosynthesis.

As modern instrumentation improves the precision of the measurements of underwater light, particularly of monochromatic light, both biological and physical oceanographers are becoming increasingly interested in such measurements in deep water

There have been few analyses of the fat, protein and carbohydrate fractions in zooplankton, and owing to the difficulty of sorting large numbers of single species, the majority of the earlier determinations were necessarily carried out on mixed zooplankton hauls (Brandt, 1898; Brandt & Raben, 1919; Moberg, 1926; Wimpenny, 1929; Drummond & Gunther, 1934; Vinogradov, 1953). Most of these analyses suggested a relatively high protein and fat content, and this was confirmed by Orr (1934 a), who investigated the chemical composition of a single species, Calanus finmarchicus. Orr's result gave fat, protein and chitin as 20–40,35–50 and 3%, respectively of dry weight. Similar high values were also reported by Orr (1934 b) for Euchaeta norvegica. The carbohydrate content was not, however, estimated in either of Orr's investigations since large numbers of animals would have been required. Brandt (1898), after analysing mixed plankton hauls which were predominantly copepods, suggested a carbohydrate content of ca. 20%.

This paper is the fourth in a series dealing with the fecundity of flatfish (Bagenal 1957 a,b, 1958), and is concerned with the egg numbers in ripening female plaicePleuronectes platessa L. caught in the English Channel.

On 27 November 1957, eighty-five plaice with maturing ovaries were caught in Rye Bay, Sussex; on I December, eight similar fish were caught in Lyme Bay, and duringDecember sixty-four locally caught female plaice were brought in to the Plymouth Laboratory. The dates of the collections were chosen because in January 1957 I had found that a small proportion of the Plymouth plaice were spent. All the fish caught in November and December were at a suitable stage for fecundity estimation: that is, the eggs were well developed though none had begun to turn translucent.

This paper is the fifth in a series dealing with the fecundity of flatfish (Bagenal, 1957a, b; 1958, i960), and is concerned with the numbers of eggs in, the roes of ripening female plaice Pleuronectes platessa L. caught off the south and west coasts of Ireland during November and December 1958. The fish were obtained from Wexford, Ballycotton, Schull, Dingle, Galway and Killybegs (Fig. 1).

A new coccolithophorid, Crystallolitkus hyalinus, was described with the help of electron micrographs by Gaarder & Markali in 1956 from preserved material in which the cells lacked the appendages. From temporary cultures set up from our September 1957 sea-water samples a coccolithophorid was isolated which appeared, under the light microscope, very similar to this newly described coccolithophorid but which possessed, as does the genus Chrysochromulina, a coning haptonema in addition to the two flagella. Electron micrographs, taken for us by Prof. I. Manton, have shown that the holococcoliths from our organism are identical in structure with those from the Crystallolithus hyalinus (cf. PL I, and Gaarder and Markali, 1956, pi. I).

The observations to be recorded here have been carried out primarily for the purpose of clarifying the taxonomic position and naming of the small organism previously known as Chromulina pusilla Butcher. This had been shown (Manton, 1959a) to possess the pigments and fine structure appropriate to a position in or near the Chlorophyceae but quite inappropriate to a position within the Chrysophyceae to which the genus Chromulina properly belongs. Before selecting a new generic name, it was highly desirable to make some comparative electron microscopical observations on authentically named material of appropriate kinds since the fallibility of the light microscope for study of organisms of this order of size (1–3µ) had been all too clearly exposed. A search was therefore made for a representative or representatives of the only genus of green flagellates known to us from the literature to possess a single posteriorly directed flagellum, namely Pedinomonas.

Analyses of sea water collected during 1958 at the International Hydrographic Station E1 (lat. 50° 02′ N., long. 4° 22′ W.) are given here in the same form as in earlier reports (Armstrong, 1954, 1955, 1957, 1958; Armstrong & Butler, 1959). The methods of collection and analysis remain the same. Salinities were determined by the Government Chemist, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. We wish again to thank Lt.-Cdr. C. A. Hoodless, D.S.C., and the crew of R.V. ‘Sarsia’, and Capt. W. J. Creese and the crew of R.V. ‘Sula’ for help at sea.

The capture of a remarkable viviparous deep-sea jellyfish, Stygiomedusa fabulosa, has already been reported (Russell, 1959). We have now had an opportunity of making a more detaileexamination of the specimen, which has been added to the collection of the British Museum as the type specimen under the catalogue number B.M. 1960.4.7.1.

Among the various small Malacostraca that have lately been found living interstitially in the Eddystone shell gravel (see Spooner, 1959 a,b), one of the moreremarkable is a new member of the genusIngolfiella. This genus of small colourless blind amphipods occupies a very isolated position, and is customarily given the rank of a separate suborder. The six species hitherto recognized are listed in Table i, and their geographic relationships shown in Fig. 5 (p. 328).

The British Phycological Society was founded in 1952 to serve as a meetingground for phycologists, and to carry out a co-ordinated scheme of work on the algae of this country. The specific projects included the production of a Flora of British Marine Algae and the publication of a series of biological studies of individual genera and species.

The species was first distinguished by Carmichael, as Ceramium acanthonotum, in his unpublished Algae Appinensis, the manuscript of which is now preserved at the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Harvey (in Hooker, 1833), in publishing Carmichael's description, regarded the species merely as a variety of C. ciliatum. Agardh (1844) raised the variety to specific status, and it is as C. acanthonotum that the species has been known generally. Kiitzing (1841), 1 in a revision of the genus Ceramium, had described the entity independently as Acanthoceras shuttleworthianum; the specific epithetshuttleworthianum has priority overacanthonotum [see Article 60 of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (Lanjouw, 1956)]. The priority of the epithet shuttleworthianum was indicated, independently, by both Silva (1959) and Dixon (1959); of the two publications, that by Silva is the earlier.

Before describing the new aquarium some mention should be made of the final state of the old, which was described in detail some years ago (Wilson, 1952). Various suggestions for improvement made at that time were subsequently carried out. Thus the central table tanks were removed in 1953 and the central curtains, after shortening, were hung from the ceiling above the front top edge of the south-side tanks. This gave greatly improved viewing of the tank contents through exclusion of direct daylight to the public hall, and the viewing was still further improved when the south-side windows were blackened inside and the tanks lit solely by electric light. Modifications to the reservoirs (described below) brought about a clarity of the sea water never before attained.