1. THE PRAWN.2. THE ÆSOP PRAWN.3. THE SHRIMP.
PLATE XXIX
THE SANDHOPPER (1 and 1 A)
Commoner even than the shrimps are the Sandhoppers. On any sandy part of the shore you may find them in thousands and thousands. If you walk along the beach where the sand is dry, and step rather heavily, you will see their holes opening all round you. If you walk along it where it is damp, you will find that it is honeycombed with their burrows. If you turn over a stone, or lift up a piece of sea-weed which has been thrown up by the waves, twenty, or thirty, or forty of them will come skipping out like so many tiny kangaroos. And if you walk near the edge of the water when the tide is coming in you may often see them leaping about in such vast numbers that they look just like a thick mist rising for a foot or eighteen inches into the air.
Yet sandhoppers have so many enemies that it really seems wonderful that any of them should be left alive at all. Nearly all the shore birds feast upon them, and so do many of the land birds. Indeed, when the tide is rising, you may often see a long line of birds standing closely side by side together a few feet in front of the water’s edge and gobbling up the active little creatures in thousands. Then the shore crabs are very fond of them, and destroy thousands more. And even when they are buried deeply in the sand they are not safe, for there is a little beetle which goes down their burrows after them, and catches and eats them there very much as a ferret catches a rabbit in its hole.
But it is just as well that they do not all get eaten, for sandhoppers are very useful little creatures indeed. They feed upon the masses of decaying sea-weed which are constantly flung up on the shore by the waves. For they, too, belong to the great army of “Nature’s Dustmen,” like the “zoeas” of the crabs and lobsters, and help to clear away all kinds of rubbish which would poison the air and the water if it were left to decay. Indeed, they will eat almost anything, and if you were to tie up a number of sandhoppers in your handkerchief, and leave them there for a few minutes, you would never be able to use the handkerchief again; for you would find that their sharp little jaws had nibbled it into holes.
If you watch a sandhopper carefully when it is skipping about, you will find that it leaps by doubling its body up, and then straightening it out again with a sudden jerk.