~ ee me TENTAT et OME BOE ty yA cine oe cations were carried out immediately. Experience shows that tais is impractical on board ship. It is difficult, however, to visualize the sharing process restricied to one sample and not the other, and, in addition, extremely difficult to conceive of 2 mechanism that controls the sharing on a dry weight basis, rather than on wet weight, total surface or some other parameter. The reriarkably consistant results of activity on a dry weight basis, of cne sample, leads one to suspect that the uptake and retention of radionuclides from fine fallout is directly related to the anhydrous weight of the organism throughout 2 wide range of water content. Certain of the Y - 8 zooplankton types are roughly 5 times as active, specifically, as are similar organisms in the Y - 6 catch. Increase of this sort could have been expected since the Y - 8 water mass was fot-nd by field gamma measurements to have been (Refer~ TABLE 3 THE PHYSK'AL STATE OF FISSION PRODUCT ELEMENTS IN SEA WATER FOLLOWING AN UNDERWATER VAPORIZATION (From Reference 2) Element Sr ar Np Ru Ce Ionic Physical State Colloidal Particulate pet pet pet 3 96 9 100 95 5 85 1 o 5 4 0 1 10 98 ence 1) roughly ten times more radioactive than the V - 6 and also because the Y - 8 organisms were exposed roughly twice as long to the contaminaied water as those of the ta. Y-6 samples. However, there is no exact proportion exhibitec. between resulting activity, and time cultiplied by exposure activity; this too may be entirely the result of the presence of large particles in the Y - 8 water as discussed above. Table 2 illustrates again that radio nuclides of zirconium and niobium are likely to be concentrated upon solid suspended particles especially on living organic maiteriais. The s imething is seen on land where these particles coliect on tree leaves and on carpet dust. No analyses were made during this early study of the sea water in these neighborhoods that would lead to an absolute estimate of the radiostrontium in the sea itself. Only gamma analyses were made of the water samples taken in this vicinity. Therefore it is not possible to estimate what affinity the organisms have toward strontium in comparison with any other radionuclides. Figure 3 illustrates that two different setal feeders, nameiy the herbivorous copepod and the euphausiid Stylocheiron, exhibit « different affinity for gamma emitters. The former show a strong spectral peak of energy between 0.49 Mev and 0.54 Mev, while the latter shows a broad peak between 0.65 Mev and 0.85 Mev. The sample of rapacious copepods showed no significant peak above background. Thug there is no apparent rela~ tionship between feeding method and activity whvreas there is an indication that two species within the setal foeding class behave quite differently regarding the kind of activity retained in a preserved sample. From Figure 1 it can be seen that the beta energies of a setal, rapacious and an unclassified type are similar whereas the ration ct the beta to gamma energies are some- what different. The latter is the only strong correlation between feeding type and affinity to active material. The curves of beta decay between 10 and 60 days shown in Figure 2 can scarcely be i6