A Record of Paper Nautilus (Argonauta Argo and A. Hians) in Puerto Rico

A Record of Paper Nautilus (Argonauta argo and A. hians) in Puerto Rico

EDGARDO A. R. ORTIZ-CORPS, Biology Department, Humacao University College, CUH Station, Humacao, Puerto Rico 00792.

ERNEST H. WILLIAMS, JR. AND LUCY BUNKLEY-WILLIAMS, Caribbean Aquatic Animal Health Project, Department of Marine Sciences, University of Puerto Rico, PO. Box 908, Lajas, Puerto Rico 00667.

The junior authors examined the gut contents of 17 dolphins, Coryphaena hippurus Linnaeus (Perciformes: Coryphaenidae), ranging from 94 to 115 cm in fork length (FL) caught off La Parguera, Puerto Rico, 20 May 1993, One 106 cm FL dolphin had in its stomach two specimens of the Common Paper Nautilus, Argonauta argo Linnaeus (Cephalopoda: Argonautidae),

NOTES 341 and one specimen of Brown Paper Nautilus, Argonautu hians Lightfoot. These mollusks are known to be circumtropical (Abbott, 1974); however, we found only one reference to the collection of a damaged Common Paper Nautilus shell collected from a beach in Jamaica (Humfrey, 1975); and we have not located records of the Brown Paper Nautilus in the Caribbean. Another specimen of the Common Paper Nautilus was collected from a beach in Bermuda by Iliffe (1980). Our record of the Brown Paper Nautilus is apparently the first from the Caribbean.

Paper Nautiluses should be an available food resource for dolphins, as they are members of the same species-poor assemblage found in tropical surface waters. Abbott (1974) noted that A. hians is occasionally found in the stomachs of dolphin. Manooch et al. (1984) found A. argo in dolphin stomachs collected from the southeastern Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts of the USA, but only reported these cephalopods in 9 of 2219 fish examined. Our record may also represent the first instance of both the Common and the Brown Paper Nautiluses occurring together in the same dolphin stomach.

Acknowledgments. —We thank Dr. William G, Dyer, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and his son, Mr. Richard L. Dyer, for help in examining the dolphins; Mr. Hiram Lopez Irizarry for allowing us to examine his catch; and Drs. R. Tucker Abbott and Jeffrey G. Holmquist for reviewing the manuscript. Supported by the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources and Wallop-Breaux Sport Fish Restoration Funds, project No. F-28.

LITERATURE CITED

Abbott, R. T. 1974. American seashells, 2nd ed. Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, New York. 663 pp.

Humfrey, M. 1975. Seashells of the West Indies. Taplinger Publ. Co., New York. 151 pp.

Iliffe, T. M. 1980. Argonauta argo: the paper nautilus. Newsletter of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research 9(1):2.

Manooch, C. S., D. L. Manson, and R. S, Nelson. 1984. Food and gastrointestinal parasites of dolphin, Coryphaena hippurus collected along the southeastern and Gulf coasts of the United States [of America]. Bull. Jap. Soc. Sci. Fish. 50:1511-1525.