The tiny elephant shrew (its elongated nose gives it the appearance of a miniature elephant) apparently never closes its eyes. It is a desert animal, continually exposed to danger, and must “see” even when it is asleep.
Soundest sleepers are the burrowing animals, even when they take their naps above ground. They are conditioned through innumerable generations of safe slumber in their subterranean chambers. Sleeping pocket mice and hamsters can be picked up without being awakened.
Sleep habits appear to be well adjusted to the needs of each species. Most bats, for example, sleep hanging head downward, suspended by the nails of the hind feet. This places them in a good position for sudden flight at any alarm. They have only to let go with their toes and spread their wings.
Curious sleepers are the armadillos. They tremble almost continually in their sleep.
Eerie lights shine in the silent blackness of the jungle night. There are red lights and green lights, orange lights and yellow lights. They are reflections from the eyes of all sorts of animals.
This weird phenomenon has been observed closely for some years by Ernest P. Walker of the National Zoo in Washington. The shining of eyes is a fairly well-known phenomenon but most of the observations have been made in the wild. The owner of the eyes is usually unknown, and it is virtually impossible to observe the animal again. Mr. Walker has concentrated his observations on caged animals.
He uses a reflecting headlamp, similar to a hand flashlight, worn on the forehead and connected with a three-cell battery in his pocket or attached to his belt. This is necessary because the rays of reflected light must parallel closely the line of sight of the observer.
The “shines” range in color from pale silvery through silver, blue-green, pale gold, gold, reddish gold, brown, and amber to pink, with a range of intensity from dull to very brilliant. The eyes of alligators and crocodiles “give one the impression that he is looking into a brilliantly glowing pinkish opening in a dull-surfaced bed of coal”. Most eye shines of mammals have the appearance of coming from highly polished metal surfaces.
“Sometimes,” explains Mr. Walker, “it is like looking into an incandescent globe of the color indicated. Often pronounced light rays seem to emanate from the eyes. With some eyes, such as those of the smaller rodents, the effect is that of looking into an illuminated piece of amber.
“In the case of animals that have eyes that glow, it appears that we look into the eye through the pupil as if the reflection came from the front surface of the retina. In those animals that give a reflection as if from polished metal I gain no impression of looking into the eye. In most cases the reflection is not obtainable closer than from eight to twenty feet—a distance which prevents one from observing which surface reflects. The reflection from alligators and crocodiles can be seen when the observer is within a foot of the animal.”
Most animals stare at light, or barely move their heads. There seldom is any “startle” response when a beam is flashed upon them. There is no shine in the eyes of higher apes and monkeys. There have been reports of something of the sort from human eyes, but no definite proof has been offered. There was a faint suggestion of a reflection from the ring-tailed lemur, a close relative of the monkey family. On the other hand, the most brilliant eye-shine of all was from two tiny members of the lemur tribe, the slow loris and the potto.
The majority of rodent eyes shine dully in browns, hazel or amber. Porcupines are an exception. Their eyes are very brilliant, generally silver and reflecting over a wide angle. Whether snakes have any true eye reflection is questionable. Light is reflected, however, from the surface of the scales over the eyes.
There is a fifth realm of life—the wet, heavy, black darkness of limestone caves whose chambers, ponds and streams harbor almost a hundred species of worms, pseudo-worms, fish, insects and salamanders which have become adapted to life in this cheerless world over millions of generations.
Nearly all are white and blind. Blind white fish chase and eat blind white worms. Blind white spiders spin nets to trap blind, white flies. All are sluggish creatures. Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave alone contains approximately 50 species. Latest to be classified scientifically are small, rather gruesome white worms of the sort one might imagine feeding on the dead. They live in water, clinging to the bottoms of rocks.
Most spectacular of cave animals is the spectral Proteus, found in limestone caves of Dalmatia, Carinthia and Carnolia in southeastern Europe. It is a kind of salamander, related to frogs and toads. It looks and acts like a big white worm. The creature is about a foot long and pure white except for its gills, which are vivid red. There are three pairs of these gills, which look like coarse feathers, just behind the head.
The Proteus spends its whole life in total darkness, and at an almost constant temperature of 50 F. The body is slender and decidedly wormlike, but there are two pairs of very feeble, inconspicuous little legs, placed quite far apart.
Nature has made the Proteus a true creature of darkness—perhaps more so than any land-dwelling worm. As described by the late Dr. Austin H. Clark, Smithsonian Institution biologist: “The Proteus is almost as sensitive to light as a photographic plate. The light of a candle at some distance is strong enough to make it restless. If it is kept in a place from which light is not entirely excluded its white skin turns cloudy with the appearance of gray patches, and if it is kept in an ordinary lighted room it eventually turns jet-black.”
Proteus is eyeless. It seems feeble and helpless. Yet it is well adapted for its life in dark caves. Most of the time it lies at the bottoms of pools, completely motionless. But, says Dr. Clark, “any small living thing in the water attracts its immediate attention. It advances toward it, snaps it up and eats it. It seems to be guided mostly by the movements of its victims in the water, possibly also by a sense of smell. In the deep caves food naturally is scarce and the animal often must go for a considerable time without anything to eat. In captivity individuals have lived for months with no food at all.”
Ghostly dweller in the everlasting darkness of limestone caves in the Ozarks is the Typhlotrition, a blind, wormlike white salamander of the same general family as Proteus. It is a long, slender, nearly transparent creature, which has evolved a long way towards complete blindness. The newly hatched young have functioning eyes but these degenerate in the adult so that it does not seem able to discriminate light from darkness. It is barely able to stand on its thin, barely visible legs. It lives on blind crustaceans and apparently spends most of its life crawling through the small, underground streams which seep through the limestone rocks of the Ozark foothills.
A quite similar creature of the same family was discovered in 1896 in Texas during the boring of an artesian well. A subterranean stream was struck at a depth of about 200 feet. From it this white, wormlike creature was shot out, together with some remarkable crab-like animals. A single specimen of a similar animal since has been found in Georgia. Both these organisms are more wormlike even than Proteus. They apparently have lived for milleniums in streams flowing hundreds of feet below the earth. Both, it has been conjectured, are larval forms of a well-known salamander of surface waters, which have become permanent larvae. They have lost the ability to undergo metamorphosis, like the change of a tadpole into a frog or a caterpillar into a butterfly.
Most numerous of American limestone cavern animals are white, blind grasshoppers—the cave crickets. They are small insects with antennae about an inch long. With these they feel their way over the dank walls upon which they swarm. Best known are three species of cave fish, minnow-like and from two to three inches long. They have not lost their eyes entirely, although these long since have been sightless. They have compensated for the loss of sight by an extremely acute sense of touch. The slightest movement of the water will send a school of them scurrying for shelter among the rocks. The blind white worms are supposedly their chief food.
None of the cave animals are very aggressive. Their chief nutriment is believed to be organic matter carried by water, which seeps into the dank chambers from the world above, but how they make use of this is unknown. All are quite primitive types which have remained very conservative after their first migration from the world of light into the world of darkness. They are old both racially and in their behavior as individuals. Secure in the black depths, some of them are quite likely to be the last living creatures on earth.
Fantastic giant of the nemertinean race is Cerebratulus lactus, commonly known as “the clam worm” along the Atlantic Coast from Florida to Massachusetts. It is from ten to twelve feet long, can contract to two feet, and is an inch wide. Its favorite dwelling is a burrow six to eight inches below the surface, usually in an old mussel bed among broken shells and stones where it is almost impossible to sink a clam hoe.
Outside the burrows it is seldom seen except occasionally at high tide, gliding among sea weeds or in the shade of rocks in tidal pools. It is unlikely that any burrow is occupied very long, as the nemertinea is moving about constantly through mud in search of food. The animal is highly specialized for burrowing. Ordinarily its “head”, or front end, is broad and rounded. By a muscular contraction, however the shape of the head can be made pointed and is thrust forward in the mud, when its normal contour is resumed. Then again comes the muscular contraction, the pointed head, and another thrust forward. This occurs over and over again. The contraction waves follow each other so quickly that the drilling process appears constant. The proboscis does not seem to be used in the actual drilling operation, but is kept probing for points of least resistance and turns aside at the slightest obstacle.
The favorite food of cerebratulus lactus is said to be another abundant burrowing worm, the nereid, which is nearly as large in diameter, belongs to a higher order, and has powerful biting jaws. The victim always is swallowed tail first. Its burrow is a U-shaped tube in which it is unable to turn around. The nemertean probes through the mud for the tail end in such a burrow. The nereid, seized from behind, cannot bring its fighting apparatus into use. Actually, however, it never appears to struggle against being swallowed—a remarkable fact since nereids fight fiercely among themselves. The reason, it has been postulated, is that the victim’s nervous system is paralyzed by the poisonous slime excreted by cerebratulus. When a minute drop of this is placed on the tongue, it parches the whole mouth and the intensely bitter taste remains a long time. The worm requires about ten minutes to swallow a nereid, but by that time the prey is half-digested. The flow of this mucous is quite copious. When several healthy worms are placed in a pail, the bottom is soon filled with a hardening mass of it from which the animals must be cut or pulled. When crawling, the worm exudes a mucous trail, like a snail.
A comparable Mediterranean species, Nemertes borlasi, was described by the French naturalist Quatrefages:
“This gigantic worm is from thirty to forty feet long, brown or violet, and shining as varnished leather. It lurks under stones and in hollows of rocks where it may be met with, rolled into a ball and coiled in a thousand seemingly inextricable knots which it is incessantly loosening and tightening by contraction of its muscles. The animal is nourished by sucking a kind of small oyster which attaches itself to various substances under water. When it has exhausted the food around, it extends its long, dark-colored, riband-like body, which is terminated by a head bearing some likeness to the head of a serpent. It pauses gently, moves from side to side as if endeavoring to investigate the ground, and finally succeeds in finding a stone to suit its purposes about fifteen to twenty feet from its former retreat. It then begins to unwind its coil and arrange itself in a new domicile. In proportion as one knot is loosened, another forms at the opposite extremity.”
A report of the Gatty Marine Laboratory of St. Andrews University in Scotland tells of the species Cerebratulus angulatus, which was mistaken for a fish. “But when the fisherman stretched out his hand net to capture it, instantly to his astonishment it shot out to more than a yard long. In the laboratory it swam with undulatory up-and-down movements, as an eel swims laterally.”
The nemertinea are a progressive race. Some have invaded the deep sea and some the dry land. They have been obtained from depths of more than 6,000 feet. The deep-sea species have undergone peculiar adaptations for a life of swimming slowly or floating idly at whatever depths they have chosen for their habitat. They have lost their eyes and their brains are quite rudimentary compared with those of their land or shallow-water relatives. All have increased greatly the amount of gelatinous tissue between the internal organs, so that they have a low specific gravity. The deep-sea forms thus far collected are broad and flat. Some have taken on the appearance of small fish with outgrowths on the sides of the body which resemble fins, and with the rear end flattened like a fish’s tail. Some have developed tentacles around their mouths.
Most of the ribbon worms of the open sea are nearly transparent. Some, however, are among the most brilliantly colored of the nemertinea race, with coat patterns of yellow, orange, red, and scarlet. Most of these creatures are small, measuring only a fraction of an inch in length. The largest is about six inches long—thus, as one biologist points out, comparing to the smallest like an ox to a mouse. These pelagic species are found in all the oceans. They are carried around the world by deep-sea currents.
About twelve species have abandoned the shore for dry land where they lead active lives and seem to have become almost independent of water. They cannot, however, endure being completely dried out. They do not make their own burrows, but in periods of drought, it is believed, they make use of earthworm burrows. Some have been found under the dead, damp bark of tropical trees. Their chief food consists of earthworms.
The largest flying animal the world has known was a winged reptile, the pterodactyl, of a hundred million years ago. It had a wing spread of more than twenty feet, supporting in the air a body which would hardly have weighed more than thirty pounds. Its head was nearly four feet long with a dagger-like, narrow, pointed toothless beak. It lived around the ancient sea which once extended northwestward from the present Gulf of Mexico through most of Kansas. Presumably it lived entirely on fish and made long, gliding flights over the water.
The structure of this reptile, insofar as it could be realized from fragmentary fossil bones, was studied carefully by Dr. Samuel P. Langley while he was at work on early models of his airplane. Did the pterodactyl, Dr. Langley asked in a somewhat pessimistic progress report, represent the best Nature could do in the way of flight? Could man hope to do better than Nature?
One of the most vicious of insects is the fire ant of South America—a small red ant whose sting burns like the point of a red hot pin pushed into the skin. Hordes of these creatures have forced the populace to abandon Brazilian towns. The soil of a village can be completely undermined by the ants. The ground is thoroughly perforated by the entrances to their subterranean galleries.
“The houses are overrun by them,” says Edward Bates in A Naturalist on the Amazon. “They dispute every fragment of food with the inhabitants and destroy clothing for the sake of the starch. All eatables must be suspended from rafters in baskets, with the cords well soaked in balsam, the only known means of preventing the ants from climbing. They seem to attack persons out of sheer malice. If we stood for a few hours in the street, even at a distance from their nests, we were sure to be overrun and severely punished. The moment an ant touched the flesh he secured himself with his jaws, doubled his tail, and stung with all his might.”
Birds rival ants and termites as architects. One species builds nests as big as small human dwellings—as much as 25 feet long, 15 feet wide and ten feet high. This is the sociable weaver bird of the desert western areas of South Africa. Such an apartment house, woven out of sticks and straw, may contain as many as 95 individual nests. It is the community product of a flock of from 75 to 100 pairs. The sheer bulk of the nesting material gathered is striking evidence of the impelling year-round urge of the building instinct.
This bird, says Dr. Herbert Friedmann, Curator of Birds at the Smithsonian Institution, “is about as sociable as any bird could possibly be. It is always found in flocks, feeds in flocks, and breeds in the large, many-apartmented compound nests. With this extreme socialibility and sedentary habit of life the territorial relations of the species have been modified in a way that is quite remarkable, perhaps unique, among birds. Instead of each pair having its own breeding territory, each flock seems to have a definite territory whose boundaries are seldom crossed by individuals of other flocks.
“In an area of approximately 1,000 square miles I found only 26 nests. The flocks ordinarily do not live in very close juxtaposition to each other. The nests are so large, so conspicuous at great distances, and the trees so relatively few in number that I am quite certain I found practically every nest in the area.”
In spite of the highly developed communal life, Dr. Friedmann notes, there appears to have been no break-down of the family. Whether each male has one or several mates, however, is unknown. In the construction of the apartments there is some evidence that each family builds its own individual nest, while the whole flock cooperates in constructing a roof over the whole. The structures often become so heavy eventually that they crash to the ground and all the work must be done over.
Woodpeckers that carve “apartment houses” out of hardwood tree trunks have been observed by Dr. Alexander Wetmore in the dark, rain-drenched forests of the La Hotte mountains in Haiti. On one occasion he was astonished to find a dozen pairs going in and out of nests in a single dead tree trunk standing in an open space, the holes being from three to ten meters from the ground and in some cases less than a meter apart. There was no question that the woodpeckers were colonizing, as the trunk was a veritable apartment house with the birds climbing actively over its surface and flying back and forth to the nearby woodland.
In the same mountains Dr. Wetmore found another apartment builder, the palm chit-chat. It is a gregarious species that lives in small bands, each being made up of several pairs having a communal nest as the center of its activities. The largest bands frequenting a single nest do not appear to contain more than 20 birds.
The nests are constructed of twigs about the size of a pencil and from ten to 17 inches in length. The bird itself is only seven or eight inches long. Yet it is able to carry these heavy “timbers” 30 or 40 feet from the ground. One of the nests examined was about the size of a bushel basket and evidently was occupied by only a few pairs. There was a roughly defined central tunnel four to five inches in diameter leading through the mass of sticks and opening to the outside at either end. Near each end was a slight accumulation of bark that made a little platform.
The “apartments” opened from the tunnel on each side. There was a central chamber, supposedly a community room, about five inches in diameter, its floor carpeted with fine shreds of bark. Each nest was a separate unit, with its own door to the outside. There were, however, roughly defined passages running through the interlacing twigs at the top of the nests that permitted the birds to creep about under cover.
One of the most intricate of all bird nests is that of the South African penuline titmouse, distantly related to the American chickadees. It is made of a wool-like plant fiber, very intricately and delicately woven. The form is that of a small bag hanging from a thorn bush. It has one visible opening, a false one which leads nowhere and apparently is intended entirely as camouflage. The real entrance is skillfully hidden, its location known only to the builder. When the mother bird enters the nest she lifts a concealed flap, slips through, and closes it behind her. She again closes it just as carefully when she leaves the nest. There is not the slightest indication on the surface of the finely woven fiber of the existence of the flap.
The Ceylon tailor bird, orthotomus sutorius, makes its nest by actually sewing large leaves together in the shape of a horn, using its bill as a needle. As described by the British naturalist A. G. Pinto: “The first thing she did was to make with her sharp little beak a number of punctures along each edge of the leaf. Having thus prepared the leaf, she disappeared for a little and returned with a strand of cobweb. One end of this she wound around the narrow part of the leaf that separated one of the punctures from the edge. Having done this she carried the loose end of the strand across the under surface of the leaf to a puncture on the opposite side where she attached it to the leaf, and thus drew the two edges a little way together. She then proceeded to connect most of the other punctures with those opposite them, so that the leaf took the form of a tunnel converging to a point. The under surface of the leaf formed the roof and sides of the tunnel. There was no floor to this, since the edges of the leaf did not meet below, the gap between them being bridged by strands of cobweb.
“When lining the nest the bird made a number of punctures in the body of the leaf, through which she poked the lining with her beak, the object being to keep it in situ. All this time the margins of the leaf that formed the nest had been held together by the thinnest strands of cobweb, and it is a mystery how they could have stood the strain. However, before the lining was completed the bird proceeded to strengthen them by connecting the punctures on opposite edges of the leaf with threads of cotton. She would push one end of a thread through a puncture. The cotton used is soft and frays easily so that the part of it forced through a tiny aperture issues as a fluffy knob, which looks like a knot and usually is taken as such. As a matter of fact, the bird makes no knots. She merely forces a portion of the cotton strand through a puncture and the silicon in the leaf catches the strands and prevents them from slipping. Sometimes the cotton threads are long enough to admit of their being passed to and fro, in which case the bird uses the full length.”
The leaves are not killed by the tailoring process and remain green. Hence the nest is almost impossible to detect.
Armies of billions of ferocious worms defended and preserved a fabulous 1,000-year-old Arabian Nights kingdom for three centuries. This kingdom was templed Kandy in the center of Ceylon, encircled by low, densely forested mountains. It was the site of one of the most picturesque ancient civilizations of the Orient which had degenerated into a brutal despotism when the first European invaders, the Portuguese, came to the island early in the sixteenth century.
Armed with arquebuses, the white man established missions and trading posts on the coast with little difficulty, but the forested mountains proved impassable. The Portuguese soldiers were hard put to pitch their camps in deep jungle bush and in bug-filled marshes. Grass and bushes swarmed with little green worms—extremely nimble creatures about an inch long which subsisted on the blood of warm-blooded animals. They seemed to prefer human blood. They attacked the soldiers night and day. Clothes were no protection. The worms dropped in streams of blood from eyelids and ears. They swarmed on all sides in ever-increasing numbers as the invading forces penetrated further into the jungle. With no defense against this unanticipated enemy, the Europeans were forced to retreat long before the temples of Kandy were in sight. They made no further effort to conquer the ancient kingdom.
The Dutchmen who followed the Portuguese were content to remain in their barricaded coastal trading posts. A century later came the British East India Company with a small army of Sepoys commanded by British officers. The ruler of Kandy, quite secure within his green-worm defenses, was Raja Sinha, one of the cruelest of Oriental despots. He spurned all overtures at negotiation with officers of the trading company.
Once again his kingdom was invaded. During the march into the mountains the Sepoy soldiers suffered so badly from the attacks of the worms that some died and many others deserted. The force was so badly depleted that further advance became impossible. Only when British regulars took over the invasion years later was an armed force of white men able to reach Kandy. Previously only individuals, chiefly Portuguese Franciscans, had been able to cross the terrible green-worm barrier.
Sir Emerson Tennent, British historian of Ceylon, describes these worms as normally about an inch long, slender as needles, and able to stretch their bodies to double the ordinary length. Ceylonese natives had been able to protect themselves to some extent by smearing their bodies with lemon juice and tobacco ashes.
“On descrying the prey,” says Tennent, “they advance rapidly by semi-circular strides, fixing one end firmly and arching the other forward until by successive advances they can lay hold of the traveller’s foot, when they disengage from the ground and ascend his dress in search of an aperture. The wound they make is so skillfully punctured that the first intimation is the trickling of blood or the chill feeling of the worm as it begins to land heavily on the skin.”
These worms, hirudinae or leeches, are remotely related to earthworms with a quite similar internal structure, but highly specialized for an exclusive diet of warm blood which they take from any mammal that comes within reach. The blood-sucking species—not all species are this type—have triangular mouths with extremely sharp chitinous [of the same material as the shells of insects] teeth. The bite, so rapidly and skillfully administered that it seldom is felt, has been described as resembling the movement of a circular saw. Haemadipoa, the Ceylon species, described by Tennent, reportedly has five pairs of keen eyes and as many as 100 body segments. All the blood eaters have two suckers, one on the front and one on the rear of the body, by means of which they cling to their victims. All have the ability to contract the body to a plump, pear-like form and extend it to a wormlike form.
The green worms are as much of a terror as ever to travelers in Asian jungles. A species akin to that of the Kandy defense armies guards the thickly forested approaches to the Himalayas in Nepal It is described by Dr. George Moore, chief of the United Nations medical mission to Nepal:
“These leeches, little segmented worms about two inches long, were particularly provoking and troublesome until our team reached an altitude of 14,000 feet. Along the trails, on each ledge leading to the pass, leeches would lie in the shade and moisture until nearby footsteps vibrated their sense organs. Then they would inch from rock to rock at incredible speed, traveling their entire length toward the sound in about a second and then stopping to perch on the rock with their front ends sticking in the air. Immediately they touched a human body they would fasten themselves to it and search for warm skin. Often they would drop from trees. They could penetrate eyelets of shoes and pores of socks by lengthening the entire body. Huge clots of blood would be found on the skin where the greedy worms had fattened themselves to a fragile bursting point.”
The leech encountered by Dr. Moore’s mission long has been notorious as one of the most vicious animals on earth. It has made some areas of the Himalayan foothills uninhabitable. Travelers and hunters are terrified by it. It exists in incalculable numbers and attacks at least all warm-blooded animals. Horses are driven wild. Cattle and dogs sometimes are blinded and the young and sick killed. It has been known to attack the deadly cobra, striking at the eyes and blinding the reptiles. The respect in which it is held in indicated by its zoological name montivindictus, or “defender of the mountains.”
Its stronghold is the highly humid zone at the foot of the Himalayas between altitudes of 4,000 and 6,000 feet. Its period of activity occurs during the rainy season, when it can move freely without danger of drying out. At other times it seldom is seen except at night when grass and bushes are wet with dew.
The worm lurks at the bases of plants. It is stirred to action by the slightest movement of stems or vibration caused by footfalls. An inherent impulse, or geotropism, then impels it to climb any plant or vertical object with which it happens to be in contact. At the top it extends its body horizontally and probes the surroundings.
Once a victim is found, the hungry worm seeks a thin patch of skin richly supplied with blood capillaries. There it attaches itself by means of the cup-like sucker at the front end of its body. Immediately behind this cup are three radiating ridges, or jaws, each provided with about 70 sharp teeth. With these three rows of teeth it cuts three duplicate slits on the skin, meeting at a common center. From the star-shaped wound the warm blood is sucked. Meanwhile from its own glands the leech secretes hirudin, a substance which prevents blood coagulation, and also some as yet unknown substance which preserves blood. The blood is pumped into a storage tank in the leech’s stomach. At a single feeding the animal can store up as much as three-fold its own weight. Then it can live as long as three months without another meal.
A single strand of a spider’s web may consist of several thousand separate filaments. On the creature’s abdomen are four to six teat-like organs. Each secretes through several hundred extremely minute tubes a viscous fluid which hardens immediately when exposed to air. The spider attaches its abdomen to some solid object and pulls out the threads by moving its body forward. The hind feet are used to bring the hundreds of filaments into a single thread.
Giants of the mollusk family and about the most loathsomely fantastic creatures on earth are the great squids. One may weigh as much as half a ton. The largest known specimen, a replica of which is among the Smithsonian Institution exhibits, was 55 feet long. It had ten arms, two of them approximately 35 feet long and two-and-a-half inches in diameter. Its eye measured seven by nine inches. Many strange sea serpent stories have been told by persons who merely saw a writhing arm of one of these creatures on the surface. In recent years, however, there has been no reliable report of an encounter with such an animal and it may be close to extinction. Normally it is a denizen of profound depths and darkness and presumably shuns light. It is associated chiefly with the North Atlantic, especially around Newfoundland.
There are not more than a dozen entirely authenticated accounts of seeing the monster. Just after the middle of the last century, Rev. Mr. Harvey of St. Johns, Newfoundland, began to gather “sea devil” reports from fishermen and these constitute a substantial portion of the literature on the subject. He reported that in 1874 two St. Johns fishermen in an open boat observed an object floating in the water which they thought to be wreckage: “When they approached it reared its parrot-like beak, big as a six-gallon keg with which it struck the bottom of the boat violently. It then shot out from around its head two huge, livid arms and began to entwine them around the boat. One of the men seized an axe and cut off both arms as they lay over the gunwale, whereupon the creature moved off and ejected an immense quantity of inky fluid which darkened the water for two or three hundred yards.
“Early in the morning of November 21, 1877,” Harvey informed Prof. Addison E. Verrill of Yale, “a big squid was seen on the beach at Trinity Bay, still alive and struggling desperately to escape. It had been carried in by the tide and a high inshore wind. In its struggles to get off it ploughed a trench or furrow 30 feet long and of considerable depth by the stream of water which it ejected with great force from its syphon. When the tide receded it died. The body was eleven feet long, with tentacle arms 33 feet long. The shorter arms were about eleven feet long.”
“In 1878,” Harvey reported, “Stephen Sherring, a fisherman residing in Thimble Tickle, was out in a boat with two other men. Not far from shore they observed some bulky object and supposing it might be part of a wreck they moved towards it. To their horror they found themselves close to a huge fish with large, glassy eyes, which was making desperate efforts to escape and churning the water into foam by the motions of its immense arms and tail. It was aground and the tide was ebbing.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A widely distributed family related to the serpulids are the fabricinae, or “feather dusters.” These animals, only a few millimeters long, live in the upper layers of mud in tidal basins. They are so thoroughly covered with slime and debris that they are likely to be completely overlooked. The body is thread-like except for the crown of tentacles, with from seventy to a hundred featherlike filaments. In some varieties these are white, in others translucent.
A migration that takes a toll of millions of lives takes place every year between North and South America.
Dr. Alexander Wetmore of the Smithsonian has had the experience of standing on a lonely beach on the coast of Venezuela and actually watching North American birds arrive at the end of their gruelling journey, exhausted and emaciated. Every day over his camp on the shore passed familiar birds from home—sandpipers, yellowlegs, bobolinks, barn swallows and warblers.
“There was brought to me more definitely than ever before,” Dr. Wetmore reported, “the tremendous loss of life that this journey entails. The wastage of modern human battlefields, though terrific beyond words, is nothing in comparison. On this open shore small feathered migrants often made a landfall in a state of evident exhaustion. In the early morning I found little groups of them feeding on the short herbage. Some obviously had barely made a landfall after an exhausting sea journey. In some of those that I handled the flight muscles that move the wings were reduced to thin bands through which the angular ridges of the breast bones protruded. It was easy to visualize the hundreds of thousands that had wandered over the water until they fell to drown, and the hundreds of others that arrived only to succumb to the strains imposed by their exhausting journey.”
Deadliest of serpents are the Pacific sea snakes. A bite almost certainly would be fatal to a human being. Yet native children of the Palau Islands in the South Pacific play with these reptiles with complete impunity. They pick them up and toss them from one to another just as American children play “catch.” Natives of the Palaus look upon the reptiles with complete indifference.
The term “sea snake” is somewhat of a misnomer. Actually the creatures spend most of their days asleep among rocks on beaches. They are excellent tree climbers and like to sun themselves in crotches of branches. At dusk, however, they move out to the reefs where presumably they spend most of the night pursuing small fishes, their principal food. They are excellent swimmers and their bodies have been somewhat modified, with flattened, paddle-like tails, for sea life.
Fortunately, on land at least, they are sluggish and non-aggressive. They hardly can be induced to bite and will suffer almost any indignity without retaliating. About the only way a person would be likely to be bitten would be by stepping directly on the head of one of these snakes with bare feet. This is an unlikely event, for the sea snakes do not spend any time under shallow water where they would be a peril for bathers.
Some are quite beautiful, about five feet long and banded with black and white. Their capture is easy. It is simply a matter of pinning down the head with a stick and picking up the snake by the neck.
Throughout the entire sea snake area in the Pacific there are only five or six instances reported where the serpents have bitten humans. In every case the victim has died; there is no anti-venom against the sea snake toxin.
Some years ago Dr. Herbert Clark, former director of the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory, dove off a boat in Balboa harbor and swam ashore, a distance of about 200 yards. As he neared the shore there were alarmed cries from the deck he had left. Dr. Clark looked around. He found he had unwittingly swum through a school of several thousand black and white serpents, each about two feet long. None had touched him.
Near the bottom of life’s pyramid there is a weird race of plant-animals. They are among the closest of all many-celled living things to the primaeval protoplasm from which all life arose.
They are the slime molds found on decaying logs and tree stumps in damp woods or on piles of rain-soaked dead leaves in shady gardens. The nightmarish mycetozoa—botanists call them myxomycetes—are timeless survivals out of living creation’s dank, warm cradle. Some of the weirdest imaginings of malevolent life on other planets picture it in the form of gigantic slime mold aggregations—undifferentiated masses of naked protoplasm endowed with a malign intelligence which has evolved without the intermediaries of nervous systems or brains.
These organisms can be considered one of nature’s probing experiments towards higher forms of life. The experiment was a failure, but unlike most of nature’s discards these organisms have survived. Even now they may be engaged in a process of evolution all their own.
Biologists are not entirely agreed in which kingdom to place the organisms, although they usually are classified with the plants. They start life as spores, like the dust of molds or toadstools whose single-celled particles serve the same reproductive function as seeds in higher plants. From each spore arises from one to four animal-like organisms, hardly distinguishable from the one-celled protozoan animal, the amoeba. Each swims about freely for a time by means of tentacle-like arms, the flagellae.
These free-moving living particles are known as “swarm cells”. Each is an individual with a film-like skin separating it from all other individuals. That is, the protoplasm of each cell is enclosed within a boundary and in the center of each is a nucleus. These one-celled “animals” wander about freely for a few days. During this time they may mate, as individuals. More commonly each loses its flagellae and splits into several fragments. Each of these fragments becomes a complete organism. These mate, with complete fusion of their bodies. The result is a double plant or animal—depending on whether it is observed by a botanist or zoologist—known as a zygote. The fragments are extremely voracious little creatures devouring greedily the one-celled plants, or bacteria, which they encounter.
When the fusion is complete the zygote, in turn, starts to split up into single-celled organisms but after a few divisions hundreds of these single-celled animals coalesce into a tiny ball, like the seed pod of a plant. In a few days thousands of these spheroids collect into a so-called “plasmodium”. The hitherto individual pseudo-protozoans meanwhile have lost their cell walls. The primaeval substance of millions is mixed together into a slimy mass full of cell nuclei. This is an aggregation of “naked protoplasm”. It is hardly to be compared with the body of any higher plant or animal where each cell retains something of its individuality, however closely its activities may be coordinated with those of its fellows in the same community. The mass proceeds to behave like a voracious animal. It moves and feeds as a unit and apparently with a purpose. Within the naked protoplasm there is apparently some incomprehensible sense of fellowship which eventually evolves into consciousness and intelligence, developing nerve and brain on the way upwards. It would be hazardous to say that this evolution could have taken no other path.
From the central body great numbers of thread-like filaments are sent out to penetrate the substance of rotting wood or the surface of a dead leaf. These threads seem to be like an army’s scouting parties, pushed ahead to locate supplies when advancing troops are living off the country. When a supply is found they are drawn in and the whole slimy organism acts once more as a coordinated whole.
The plasmodium moves forward steadily for about 50 to 60 seconds, pauses for a few moments, and then reverses itself and creeps backward, but never quite so far as it previously had gone ahead. Then, after another pause, it crawls forward again. Thus there is an overall slow advance and at the bottom of life the slime molds lay down the pattern of progress recapitulated in human societies and civilizations as well as in the lives of individual men and women. They merit consideration in the philosophy of history.
The advancing mass of raw protoplasm acts like an animal and grows like an animal as it ingests food, with constant splitting of the cell nuclei which it contains. There are vacuoles within the protoplasm in which the food particles are ingested. They then are digested by means of enzymes (body chemicals), as in higher animals.
Such a plasmodium can be taken from its damp habitat and dried. Then it will roll up into a ball and pass into a resting stage from which it will revive completely in a few hours when supplied with moisture again. The ball may keep its vitality for several years.
Some species pass as much as a year in the active plasmodium stage, and some a few days. At the end of this phase of its existence the mass of raw protoplasm breaks up into fragments—sometimes as many as a hundred. Then, as the process is described for one common species “in an hour or two each of these fragments has risen into a pear-shaped body with a narrow base, a dark stalk being just apparent through the translucent white substance.” In about six hours the black, hair-like stalk has grown to its full length and bears at its top a young “sporangium” consisting of a globule of viscous plasma with a diameter about a fifth the length of the stalk. This globe is about the size of a mustard seed and ranges in color from pure white through golden-yellow, light crimson, violet, purple and black.
A pink flush now begins to pervade the sporangium caused by the formation of branching threads. The nuclei in the plasma still present the same appearance as those observed in the streaming plasmodium. In about another hour these nuclei show the beginning of division. As this process develops the plasma becomes separated in masses of two spores capacity. An hour later the nuclei have divided and the young spores are forming. Their color rapidly changes. In about the first twenty hours after the first concentration of the fragments of the plasmodium they have matured and present the appearance of minute black pins standing in regular order on wood. The ripe fruit, or sporangium, then dries and breaks.
On placing the spore in water its membranous wall slips off and the naked contents lie for several hours without apparent change in an ellipsoid form. Constriction then takes place and the ellipsoid splits into one to four globular bodies adhering together and exhibiting slow amoeboid movements. Each globular body now develops a flagellum—a long, whip-like extension, and the cluster swims away by means of these flagellae.
Now the whole life process is ready to be repeated. There are more than 400 species of these slime molds and they are distributed over all the temperate and tropic zones. If only the spores and the stalked little ball containing them are considered, the slime mold would be placed squarely in the kingdom of plants. But when the protoplasm escapes from the spore and starts moving about ingesting bacteria, the behavior is that of a one-celled animal. When the cells unite to form a plasmodium there is a close likeness to a many-celled animal.