Part 9

“Finding the monster partially disabled, the fishermen plucked up courage and ventured near enough to throw the grapnel of their boat, the sharp flukes of which, having sharp points, sunk into the soft body. To the grapnel they had attached a long rope which they carried ashore and tied to a tree to prevent the fish going out with the tide. His struggles were terrific as he flung his ten arms about in dying agony. Ever and anon the long tentacles darted out like great tongues from the central mass. At length it became exhausted and when the water receded it expired. The body measured twenty feet from the beak to the extremity of the tail. The fishermen, knowing no better, proceeded to convert it to dog meat.”

At about the same time H. T. Bennett of English Harbor, Newfoundland, wrote a newspaper account quoted by Prof. Verrill: “A giant cephalopod was run ashore at Coomb’s Cove whose body measured ten feet in length and was as big around as a hogshead. One arm 42 feet long and about the size of a man’s wrist. The other arms were only six feet long but nine inches in diameter and very stout and strong. The skin and flesh were 2.25 inches thick and reddish inside as well as out. The suction cups were all clustered together near the extremity of the long arm and each cup was surrounded by a serrated edge, almost like the teeth of a handsaw. I presume it made use of this arm for a cable and the cups for anchors when it wanted to come to as well as to secure its prey. This individual, finding a heavy sea was driving it ashore tail first seized hold of a rock and moored itself quite safely until the men pulled it ashore. It was probably a female.”

The monstrous ten-tentacled mollusk fights terrible battles with whales and sometimes large parts of tentacles are spewed by leviathan in its death agonies. So far as known only one such battle ever has been witnessed and described. The British author Frank T. Bullen in the _Cruise of the Cachelot_ tells of seeing in the South Indian ocean “a very large sperm whale locked in deadly conflict with a cuttlefish almost as large as himself whose interminable tentacles seemed to enlace the whole of his body. The head of the whale seemed a perfect network of writhing arms. It appeared as if the whale had the tail part of the mollusk in his jaws and in a businesslike, methodical way was sawing through it. By the side of the black, columnar head of the whale appeared the head of the great squid, as awful a sight as one could well imagine in a feverish dream. I established it to be as large at least as one of our pipes which contained 350 gallons. The eyes were very remarkable from their size and blackness contrasted with the livid whiteness of the head. They were at least a foot in diameter. All around the combatants were numerous sharks, like jackals round a lion, apparently assisting in the destruction of the huge cephalopod.

“The occasions when these big cuttlefish appear on the surface must be very rare. From their construction they appear fitted only to grope among rocks at the bottom of the ocean. Their normal position is head downward, with tentacles spread like ribs of an umbrella. The two long ones, like the antennae of an insect, rove unceasingly around seeking prey. In the center of the network of living traps is a chasm-like mouth with an enormous parrot-like beak.”

“Insatiable nightmares of the sea,” the French philosopher Michelet called the creatures. Nothing is known, of course, of their numbers or of their ways of life in the dark depths. The few seen or captured probably have been sick or badly injured. It has been estimated that one female may lay as many 40,000 eggs in a season, but the mortality of eggs and young must be enormous. It is doubtful if one in a million ever becomes a mature animal.

A scarcely less fantastic animal, but more familiar and far less fearsome, is the eight-tentacled octopus. Some of the largest are found off the coast of Alaska. The largest known had arms 16 feet long and a radial spread of 28 feet, but the central body itself was not more than six inches wide and a foot long.

Most familiar of the race is the Mediterranean octopus; its tentacles often are sold for food in Sicilian markets. The largest known was nine feet long and weighed about 50 pounds. This animal reportedly was captured by a fisherman with his bare hands. One specimen found dead on a beach near Nassau had tentacles five feet long and weighed more than 200 pounds.

It is a rather sluggish, timid animal which seeks shelter in holes and crevasses among offshore rocks. It feeds mainly on clams and oysters. When frightened it surrounds itself with a cloud of ink-like fluid. There is no reliable reason to believe it ever attacks man.

_The Vanishing Whippoorwill_

Probably not one person in a thousand has ever seen a whippoorwill. Its melancholy song is one of the most familiar chords in the symphony of the summer evening but to the majority of listeners it is only a disembodied voice in the dark. The singer has come about as near to achieving invisibility as any living creature.

The whippoorwill is a migrant bird, spending its winters in Florida and its summers from March to October in the north. It travels entirely at night, sometimes in large flocks. It builds no nest but lays its flecked eggs on the ground depending on the flickering shadows of the woodland over the background of dried leaves to conceal them.

The bird is masterfully camouflaged by nature and usually selects a spot for its eggs where the woodland floor is free of underbrush and the trees are spaced far enough apart to cast an uneven shade. The male presumably sleeps all day while the female sits on the eggs or broods the newly hatched young, but at night he stands guard, may take his turn on the nest, and hunts insects for his mate.

The chick, almost exactly the color of the dead leaves among which it lies, remains essentially invisible. Nests are found only by accident.

Whippoorwills live almost exclusively on night-flying insects, especially moths and mosquitoes. They have been recorded, however, as sometimes hunting for worms, beetles and ants under bark, or on the ground.

The bird makes no particular effort to conceal itself from humans. Apparently it does not regard them as dangerous. There are cases where it actually has lit on the head of a man standing motionless in the dark. The female has been observed to fly about carrying her young between her thighs. She also, it has been reported, sometimes carries them in her bill, but there is no satisfactory evidence of this.

The whippoorwill is fond of taking dust baths. Sometimes one is caught by the lights of an approaching auto as it dusts itself in the middle of a country road.

The bird is remarkable for the regularity of its song and for the number of times the melancholy refrain is repeated without a pause. From 150 to 200 is not unusual. The naturalist John Burroughs claimed once to have counted 1058 such repetitions. The song is continuous from dusk until about 9:30 and from about 2 until dawn. It is heard rarely in the intervening hours.

The whippoorwill, it is pointed out in a Smithsonian report, has come to depend almost exclusively on darkness for its protection. For this reason it has suffered little, as have many other birds, with the cutting away of the forests and the advances of cities. Its enemies in the dark are some hawks, owls and foxes, but has exceptional powers of flight which often enable it to escape even when discovered.

The birds linger in the north only until the first killing frosts which destroy or drive into shelter the insects on which they feed. Then they start their night migrations southward which sometimes carry them as far as Central America.

_Ants Can Smell Almost Anything_

The sense of smell is remarkably acute in all ants—at least equalling that of dogs.

The outstanding ant odor is that of formic acid, which is somewhat like that of illuminating gas, exuded from the bodies of all species. But this is only the smell of the race. It must be subject to an infinite number of variations to most of which ants alone are sensitive. They know their comrades, even after a long separation. Famed naturalist Sir John Lubbock once returned some ants to their old nest after a separation of 21 months. They were amicably received and evidently recognized as friends. On the other hand if a strange ant is placed in a nest of her own species she is at once attacked.

Dr. William M. Wheeler insists that even the human nose can detect some different species and even, in a few cases, different castes by their odors. Thus, over and above the formic acid smell, the smell of one species suggests ether, of another lemon-geranium, and of still another rotten coconuts.

At least one species of ant has three distinct odors: 1. A scent deposited by the feet, forming an individual trail by which she retraces her own steps. 2. An inherent odor of the whole body which is identical for all of the same lineage and a means of recognizing blood relatives. 3. A nest odor, consisting of the commingled odors of all members of the colony, used to distinguish their nest from the nests of aliens.

Evidently the odor of ants changes with age. It has been pointed out that “a cause of feud between ants of the same species living in different communities is a difference of odor arising out of difference of age in the queen whose progeny constitute the communities.” Ants apparently not only differentiate the innate odors peculiar to the species, sex, caste and individual, but also the incurred odor of the nest and environment. As worker ants advance in age their progressive odor intensifies or changes to such a degree that they may be said to attain a new odor every two or three months.

_Fish That Fish For Fish_

There are fish that fish for fish with worms. That is, they use wormlike appendages of their own bodies, developed through millenia of evolution, to catch worm-eating fellow fishes. This curious quirk of fishing fish is revealed in a bulletin of the International Oceanographic Foundation.

The practice is confined to the pediculati, known as angler fishes. The best known of them lies on the bottom partially concealed in sand or mud. One of the spines of its dorsal fin is extended in the form of a jointed fishing rod. At the end there is a fleshy lump, with a striking resemblance to one of the most tasty marine worms. The fish lies perfectly still with its enormous mouth closed, while the wormlike end of its rod waves to and fro. Other fishes approach the lure until they come within striking range. Then the great mouth opens with remarkable speed and engulfs the prey, which is prevented from escaping by backward-directed teeth.

Some other deep-sea anglers have luminous lures at the tip of the rod, somewhat like a small, light-emitting fish. In the total darkness of deep waters this is fatally attractive. Because of the huge size of the angler’s mouth the prey may be almost as large as the fisherman. Other deep-sea fishes dispense with the rod but have light-emitting organs on the sides of the body. These must play some part in attracting other sea animals. Some of these luminous fishes are able to swallow other fishes many times their own size because of their ability to distend their mouths and throats.

About all the ways man has devised for catching fish have been devised by fishes themselves long before man came on the scene. Traps—for example. There is a fish in Florida waters known as the greater sand eel. It lies buried in the sand, with its great mouth open. A relative, the lesser sand eel, when frightened dives into what seems like an opening in the sand. The result is that the greater sand eel is nearly always found with a lesser sand eel, head down, in its stomach.

The ways of fish are being studied with the possibility of finding something human fishermen have not yet thought about. Thus far nothing strikingly new has developed. There recently has been much interest, says the report, in “electric fishing—either stunning fish or directing them into nets by means of electric currents.” But, it is pointed out, “the fishes themselves have long ago adopted this for their own use.” The electric ray on each side of its flat, round body has an area in which numerous cells are modified to produce electricity. This is not really so amazing when we consider that electrical impulses are generated normally in small amounts by both nerve and muscle cells. In these particular fishes, however, the electrical impulses are considerable and the arrangement of cells, like those of a battery, builds up a total electric potential sufficient to stun or even kill smaller animals in the surrounding water.

In only one case has man been able to use fish to catch fish. This has been by means of the remora, or sucking fish, which has the habit of attaching itself by means of suckers to other fishes. In 1494 Columbus witnessed the use of a captive remora for capturing turtles. It still is used for this purpose in parts of Australia and China.

The sucker fish has quite strong powers of adhesion. In the ordinary course of its life it attaches itself to sharks or other large fishes and enjoys a free ride until it comes across food. When used for fishing, it is fastened with a line around its tail and tethered to the canoe. The native paddles as close as possible to the intended victim without disturbing it. The remora then is thrown into the water toward the turtle, to which it automatically attaches itself. Once the remora is securely fixed to the turtle, the fisherman carefully plays his light line until the reptile is brought into the boat. This must be done with care because of the diving habits of turtles. They are likely to run away with lines, sucker fishes and all.

_Worms That Are Flowers_

There are carnation worms and chrysanthemum worms. There are fairy gardens of worm asters and cornflowers at the bottom of the sea. Pink, red, purple, green, and yellow petals are tentacles of worms whose tube-encased bodies, stems of the flowers animals, are buried in inshore bottom ooze or mud-filled rock crevices.

Among these worms are masons and architects that build the houses in which they pass their lives brick by brick and pebble by pebble, with an exquisite craftsmanship hardly rivaled among animals. The blossoms and architecture have, so far as known, no utilitarian function. Nature is a painter and a poet. Forever she probes with intellect, instinct, and emotion to capture fleeting fragments of colors, lights, and harmonies of the ineffable which can be woven into the material garments of life. Among her notable successes are the sabellids and serpulids and terefillids. They are tube-dwellers—thus distinguished from their free-wandering kin—polychaetes such as the fearsome Aphrodites. Many of them have been given the names of the golden-haired nymphs who, mounted on sea horses, formed the retinue of Poseidon in mythology. Loveliest of these nymphs was Amphitrite, who became the bride of the sea god and queen of the coral-forested deep. Quite appropriately, among the fairest of the sabellids is the amphitrite, essentially world-wide in distribution.

These worms are especially facile as builders. One, for example, makes the brick with which it erects the cylindrical house that is its home for life. Extending from its head are sixteen tentacles, eight on each side, fringed with petal-like outgrowths. These tentacles are joined by membranes at the base so that, when extended, they have the appearance of two fans. When the fans are brought in contact, they form a funnel with which the animal collects mud. At the bottom of this funnel is “a singular organ by which the mud, mixed with a cement-like secretion of the worm itself, is moulded into pellets. These pellets are laid, one by one, like bricks, to form the walls of a flexible tube from twelve to fifteen inches long and about as thick as a goose quill.”

This particular British sea worm, Amphitrite ventilabrum, is almost as notable for the beauty of its blossom as for its masonry. Each of the tentacles has about a thousand of the petal-like processes and each of these, it is claimed, is capable of some degree of independent action. “It is no exaggeration to affirm,” wrote the eighteenth-century British biologist Sir John Dalyell, “that the will of this lowly, defenseless creature is fulfilled by control of at least twenty thousand living parts.”

The color of the petals is basically straw-yellow, dotted and banded with brown, rouge, red, and green. “While dredging in the river Roach,” Dalyell reported, “I have come upon banks where these worms existed in hundreds of thousands and appear in masses of large extent growing erect like standing fields of corn.”

Of another British tube builder which builds tubes of cemented shells or pebbles near the roots of large sea weeds, Rev. Richard Johnston says: “Sabellarid angilica is a timid, lively, active creature whose most prominent ability is that of constructing a dwelling for itself from sand grains. It is firm, durable, and capable of great resistance. They are not easily crushed. Some appear much more brittle. Most of the dwellings are lined with a soft, silky substance formed of exudations from the body. The worms have a great preference in building materials. They always prefer sand or shells. Powdered glass is used reluctantly and soon rejected. Some tubes are short and confined, others considerably prolonged so as to afford safe retreats in danger. Some architects seem to persist in prolonging the fabric as long as material can be found. They never weary of working. Grains of sand are selected and adopted for precise spots and gelatinous matter secures them in the tube walls.”

Perhaps the most notable of all the worm builders is a five-inch-long species found in South African waters, pectinaris capensis, described by Sir John McIntosh: “The beautiful straight tube formed by this animal was composed of the spicules of sponges in short lengths placed traversely and fixed by secretion so as to form a perfectly round tunnel gently tapered from the wide to the narrow end. The spicules appeared of the same size throughout the tube. The inner surface was as smoothly formed as the outer. The labor involved in selecting and fitting with such marvelous skill the sponge spicules composing so large a tube must have been very arduous. One tube lasts the animal for life.”

McIntosh tells of another South African architect worm that “builds out of grains of sand arranged in a single layer like miniature masonry and bound together by waterproof cement.”

There are, however, widely differing degrees of artistry among the tube-dwelling polychaetes. Some tubes are rough, fragile, long, bent in various directions, and united in colonies several inches to a foot across. Sometimes tubes three to four inches long are attached horizontally to the undersides of rocks.

A large and singular terebellid is Amphitrite ornata—twelve to fifteen inches long with orange-brown tentacles capable of being extended eight to ten inches. These are kept in constant motion gathering food and material for building. The bodies of these worms are filled with blood, but there is no circulatory system. The blood, however, apparently can be forced into any part of the body by muscular contractions. The tentacles can be turned voluntarily in any direction by forcing blood into them.

Tube-building, flowering worms excited the wonder of Quatrefages as he observed them along the Bay of Biscay in the nineteenth century:

“On these coasts so violently beaten by waves we often observe small hillocks of sand pierced by an infinite number of minute openings. These little hillocks which look very much like thick pieces of honeycomb are in reality populous cities in which live in modest seclusion tubiculous annelids, the hermellas—(sabellarids) as curious as any that fall under the notice of the naturalist. The body, about two inches in length, is terminated in front by a bifurcated [two-forked] head bearing a bright double golden crown of strong, sharp silk threads. These brilliant crowns are not mere ornaments, but are the two sides of a solid door, or rather true portcullis, which hermetically closes the entrance to the habitation when, at the least alarm, the worm darts with the rapidity of lightning within its house of sand.

“From the edges of the head of this worm issue fifty to sixty slender, light-violet filaments which are incessantly moving about like numerous minute serpents. They are so many arms which can be lengthened or shortened at will and which, seizing the prey as it passes, bring it to the hollow, funnel-shaped mouth. On the sides of the body appear little projections from which issue bundles of sharp and cutting lances. Finally, the back is covered with cirrhi, recurved like circles, whose color varies from dark red to deep green.”

Most conspicuously flowerlike among the worms are the serpulids—“little snakes.”

Found the world over, they furnish passable imitations of practically all the flowers in an old-fashioned Virginia garden. Among them, for example, are the animals of inshore South African waters, described by Prof. McIntosh. Their wreaths of branchia “look like pinks, but in some varieties are purple at the base, with narrow bands of bright red and pale green. In one variety the blossoms are yellow or orange and the body is usually greenish-yellow.” “The instant it is disturbed,” McIntosh says, “this worm withdraws its lovely wreath into its tube and closes the aperture with a curious plug, funnel-shaped and placed at the end of a rather long pedicle.”

The Rev. D. Johnston describes a British flower worm (one of the sabellids) about an inch long, whose eight-inch-long tubes grow together, attached at the bottom to a stone or abandoned shell. The tube has a silk-like lining.

“Into this tube,” says Johnston, “it can withdraw with lightning-like rapidity when alarmed. Extending across its back is a row of microscopic hooks, or 14,000 to 15,000 teeth. These are used to catch the lining of the tube and draw the worm back.”

The filaments which form its blossoms, he says, are comb-like, arranged in two rows, one on each side of the mouth. They form a coronet. Under low magnification each is seen as a pellucid, cartilaginous stem from one side of which springs a double series of secondary filaments through which red blood can be seen flowing.

Some of the most conspicuous flower worms are found alone: the Atlantic coast of the United States. On diving into Chesapeake Bay one encounters tiny, colored clusters of feathers that are really gills of annelid worms. They flick instantly out of sight as their owners withdraw into tubes in the rock crevices. The blossoms are bright orange, each surrounded by a white haze caused by thousands of minute tentacles straining the water for the tiny organisms upon which they feed.

From New Jersey to Cape Cod is to be found a purple-blooming serpulid with white stems of calcium carbonate three to four inches long and an eighth of an inch in diameter.