An opportunity was taken to carry out the artificial fertilization and incubation at different temperatures of eggs of the bogue, Boops boops (Linnaeus, 1758) during a cruise on R.V. 'Cirolana' organized by the Fisheries Laboratory, Lowestoft. Adult fish for use in the experiment were obtained by bottom trawling in 165 m depth of water at 43° 44' N02° 44' W on 10 May 1980 between 0449 and 0549 h GMT. The bottom temperature at the trawling position was estimated to be ~ 11 · 8 °C, based on measurements made at nearby stations. Eggs and milt from several males and females were added to a container of sea waterheld at approximately 11 °C; after 1 h the fertilized eggs were transferred as four separate subsamples each of approximately too eggs to clean sea water in the incubation beakers. Thesebeakers were then gradually acclimatized over a period of 2 h to the incubation temperatures of80, 131, 182 and 22·8°C.

At all temperatures mortality was high during early embryonic development. At 228 °C all eggs were dead after 9J h of incubation at which time some of these specimens had formed a blastoderm cap, but with no sign of overgrowth of the yolk. In a few of the eggs held at 80 °C development proceeded normally until immediately before closure of the blastopore (~ 106 h after ferilization) when irregular vacuoles were seen in the area around the blastopore and development was disrupted; after 112 h of incubation all eggs held at 80 °C were dead.

The amphipod family Acanthonotozomatidae was represented hitherto in British waters by the generaIphimedia Rathke (includingPanoploea Thompson) andOdius Lilljeborg; Acanthonotozoma Boeck being unrecorded (Lincoln, 1979).

Material referable toAcanthonotozoma serratum (O. Fabricuius, 1780) is here reported from the East coast of Scotland. Two specimens (1 juvenile,ca. 7 mm long and 1 immature female, broken in half, estimated length 85 mm) were taken by Dr R. Earll by diving (his sample no. CR2, St. 4/3) from amongst tubes occupied by the amphipodEricthonius rubricornis Stimpson attached to boulders amongst coarse sand, depth 345 m, at Coldingham Bay, St Abbs, Berwickshire, Scotland (55° 53' 30": 2° 5' 36") on 17 August 1982. Dr Earll kindly made over his amphipod material to me for identification.

Just (1978) has reviewed the genusAcanthonotozoma and has commented on the variability of both morphology and coloration ofA. serratum from Greenland, Iceland, Spitzbergen, Russian Kara Sea, N. Norway and the Skagerrak. The Scottish material has Norwegian rather than Greenlandic characteristics. Thus the dorsal tooth on peraeonite 5 is lacking, giving the dorsum a 4-dentate appearance. Coxal plate 3 is bluntly tapered distally. Coxal plate 4 is squarish and coxal plate 7 has the posterodistal corner unproduced. The posterodistal projections of the third epimeral plate are short with a wide angle between them. The basal articles of peraeopods 57­ have a square, less sharply produced posterodistal corner.

Mouthparts and anterior peraeopoda have been dissected from the right side of the female and mounted on three slides in polyvinyl-lactophenol. No significant differences are apparent in mouthpart morphology compared with fig. 4 in Just (1978).

In July and August 1982 a bloom of Gyrodinium aureolum spread from its normal mid-Channel position to inshore waters off Plymouth. During some particularly calm weather in July and early August the presence of this bloom coincided with aberrant behaviour and some mortality of the bottom fauna. From previous observations in 1978 (Forster, 1979) it seemed probable thatthese damaging effects were related to the presence of the bloom. As soon as possible diving was carried out on positions where mortalities of affected species had been reported, or where previous observations had been made so that any changes could be easily recognized.

The survey of Balanus balanoides (L.) for metacercarial cysts of Maritrema arenaria Hadley and Castle, 1940, on the east coast of Northern Ireland by Irwin & Irwin (1980) prompted us to carry out a similar survey in the north-east of England. The site we selected was a rocky shore at Whitburn, Sunderland (Grid Ref. NZ411 613) from which six separate batches of 100 barnacles, B. balanoides, were examined. The results were as in Table 1.

Between April 1978 and July 1983 a total of 211 cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis L., was collected in the waters off Plymouth as part of a study of the cuttlebones (Denton & Gilpin-Brown, 1961). The following data were recorded for each specimen: sex, mantle length, the wet weights of the whole animal and the cuttlebone, and for females the weights of the eggs and nidamental glands. The presence of spermatophores in males was also noted. There are rather few records for the winter months; although Sepia were caught at this time they were often required for other studies. It is hoped to obtain more specimens for these months in later years.

A list of larval fish species sampled during an ecological study of the gadoid larvae in the east of the Shetland Islands area in 1978 (6–21 May) and 1979 (9–30 May) is given in Table 1· 14157 fish larvae were caught in 1978 (in 154 oblique hauls with the High Speed Loch Ewe Net, an unencased sampler with a net of 0·250 mm mesh) and 13 769 larvae in 1979 (in 93 hauls), from which 13632 and 12440 larvae were identified and measured in these 2 years respectively. Most unidentified specimens were damaged. Larval fish taxonomy is given according to Russell (1976). The description of the sampling instrument and the working procedure at sea can be found elsewhere (Economou, 1983).

The Gadidae family dominated all others accounting for more than 85% of the total, the three most abundant species being Norway pout(Trisopterus esmarkii (Nilsson)), haddock(Melanogrammus aeglefinus (L.)) and whiting (Merlangius merlangus (L.)).

Whiting appeared under three pigmentation patterns, the normal one, another with very weak pigment and a third having the dorsal side of the body very strongly pigmented, sometimes with a gap free of pigment along the dorsal contour. The characters of the last two forms correspond somewhat with the descriptions of the whiting larvae from the southern North Sea and the Loch Etive (Russell, 1976). Norway pout displayed the typical form of melanophores but few specimens presented a pattern of fine but intense spots. There was some evidence that a few of the larvae identified as Norway pout at the end of May 1979 were actually Trisopterus minutus larvae.