The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has conducted fisheries bottom trawl surveys along contiguous sections of the North American coast in the eastern North Pacific Ocean since the mid-1970s (Pereyra et al., 1978; Gunderson and Sample, 1980) and the surveys provide valuable data and specimens for studying the geographic distributions of a wide variety of marine taxa. The NMFS Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) conducts surveys on the continental shelf and upper slope to a bottom depth of 1000 m in the Gulf of Alaska (von Szalay et al., 2010). Recent efforts by NMFS to document the diversity of Alaska’s marine invertebrate fauna (Drumm et al., 2013; Drumm et al., in press) have revealed new records for species in the area. A standard practice for AFSC surveys is the collection and identification of fish stomach contents to understand the food habits of commercial fishes.
The Thoridae (= Hippolytidae sensu lato in part, see De Grave et al., 2014) is the largest family of marine shrimps in the northeastern Pacific Ocean, containing eight genera and 57 described species (De Grave and Fransen, 2011). Thorid shrimps occur worldwide but are most diverse in cooler waters of the northern hemisphere. The genus Spirontocaris, commonly called ‘blade shrimps’, is currently composed of 22 species (Fransen, 2015) distributed in the North Pacific Ocean, the North Atlantic Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean (Butler, 1980). The species are characterized by their distinctive bladed rostrums, possess two or more supraorbital spines, and have an exopod on the third maxilliped.
Examination of the stomach contents of a specimen of the Pacific cod, Gadus macrocephalus Tilesius, 1810 that was collected in the northern Gulf of Alaska revealed the presence of a fully intact, nearly undigested specimen of Spirontocaris truncata Rathbun, 1902, extending its distribution range approximately 1800 km to the north. It is the first record of this species in Alaskan waters. With the addition of this species, there are now 13 species of Spirontocaris recorded from Alaska (Drumm et al., in press). Material is deposited at the California Academy of Sciences (CASIZ).