The Sheldon spectrum is an empirically-observed feature of marine life by which the size of an organism is inversely correlated with its abundance in the ocean. The spectrum is named after Ray Sheldon, a marine ecologist at Canada’s Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Sheldon and colleagues first suggested the existence of the inverse correlation based on seagoing measurements of plankton made with a Coulter counter in the late 1960s, most notably during the first circum-navigation of the Americas aboard the CCGS Hudson.