Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2009
From analyses of the gut content of Sabella penicillus L. Hunt (1925, as S. pavonina) showed that the food consists mainly of finely sorted plankton and detritus. The chief constituents were usually bottom-living diatoms, but planktonic forms when present made up the bulk of the food. Peridinians, silicoflagellates, foraminifera and tintinnids were also found to occur. These observations were confirmed by Nicol (1930) and in the present study, in which some individual worms were found to contain very large numbers of planktonic dinoflagellates, and pieces of red, green and brown algae, and encysted flagellates.