Tessiarsuk, or Salt Water Pond as it is called locally, has been known and intermittently fished for many years by the inhabitants of Nain. Although scant interest is shown in this unique body of water during the summer months when cod become so plentiful in the fjords, periodic expeditions are made overland in winter to jig through the ice for the large, if relatively scarce, Gadus callarias. [...]

No description available.

The appearance of massed insects is indeed familiar to anyone who has observed the activities of ant colonies, bee swarms, large groups of aphids and other insects in his own garden. Without a great deal of imagination these swarming animals may appear not unlike a highly viscous liquid, each individual insect playing the role of an individual molecule. For instance, a large number of brown flour beetles has the peculiar appearance of slowly spreading brown molasses at room temperature, and, at a slightly higher temperature, that of thick lubricating oil. Further, the mass may be poured through a funnel and their volume measured with a graduated cylinder. These are the most obvious of their fluid characteristics.

The factors in nature which influence population changes are so numerous and so complex that it seems that the only hope of understanding their interrelations lies in a thorough knowledge of how each factor operates separately upon the population. Having assessed the value of each agent by itself we may look to the biomathematician to describe their interdependence. Population changes depend upon nutrition, weather, competition between species, fecundity and the incidence of disease, parasites and predators.

Chapman (4) observed that the levels assumed by a population of poikilothermic animals depended upon the 'resistance' that the environment presented to the 'biotic potential' (ability of organisms to survive and reproduce) of the organisms of that population. He postulated that a modification of Ohm's law for electrical resistance could be used in the calculation of the resistance that any environment presents to a species. Thus the degree to which various environments affect the biotic potential of a species could be expressed by a series of exponential factors.

The harp seal, Phoca groenlandica, ranges from the eastern Canadian coast and Arctic eastward to Novaya Zemlya and adjacent Soviet areas. Within this range it is divided into three major breeding populations which can be referred to as the Eastern, breeding in the White Sea, the Central, breeding in the Jan Mayen area, and the Western, breeding off the northeast coast of Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Fig. 1). The species is strongly migratory and occupies the southern area of pack-ice for breeding in the spring, between late February and the end of April.

Our knowledge of the Euphausiacea of the western area of the North Atlantic dates back to the time of Ortmann (1893) who recorded a number of species from this area. Hansen (1915) has given a great many records of the Euphausiacea from the western Atlantic, mainly in the northwestern part. Colosi (1917) has added a few records from the Caribbean sea, Bigelow (1926) records a number of species from the offshore waters of the Gulf of Maine, of which a few are Euphausid species that also occur in the Florida straits area. A list of the species occurring from Chesapeake Bay to the northern end of the Bahama Bank has been recorded by Tattersall (1986).

Amphibians and reptiles comprise an important major segment of the vertebrate fauna of Canada: major in the sense of numbers of individuals; and important in the sense of economic value. The numbers of insects, other invertebrates, small vertebrates and especially rodents that these animals consume during a summer season are astronomical and attests to their economic value to Canadian agriculture and forestry.

Collections of planktonic copepods of Ungava Bay and central Hudson Strait were made during late June, July and August of 1947, 1949 and 1950. The following twenty-two species have been identified: Calanus finmarchicus, C.hyperboreus, C.helgolandicus, Pseudocalanus minutus , Microcalanus pygmaeus, Gaidius tenuispinus, Aetideopsis rostrata, Pareuchaeta norvegica, P.glacialis, Eurytemora americana, Metridia longa,Pleuromamma robusta, Heterorhabdus norvegicus, Acartia longiremis, A.bifilosa, Oithona similis, Oncaea borealis, Cyc10pina gracilis, C,Schneideri, Monstrilla dubia, M.helgolandica and M,canadensis. The latter five species have not previously been recorded from the western North Atlantic.

There have been many attempts to measure the crop of animals on the sea bottom in north European waters, where large numbers of benthonic species are economically important as stocks of food for commercial fish. Although the methods have also been applied to a few arctic localities (see page 8), very little is known about the size of the crop in the vast region between Greenland and the Pacific coast of Alaska. Quantitative surveys of the marine benthos were therefore made in Baffin Island during 1954 and 1955 and in West Greenland during 1956 in order to estimate the standing crop of benthos in these regions. This thesis presents the numerical data obtained in the surveys.