COLLECTING ON A CORAL REEF 85 



tain. Its flesh is much prized for salad and has a distinct flavor of the 

 nut. 



Of the multitude of reef-inhabiting shells and their variety one can 

 not even venture to speak. The natives use many of the smaller gas- 

 teropod shells in making necklaces. Often these little shells are strung 

 alternately with red or yellow seeds. The many cowries attract atten- 

 tion, particularly a small white one with light-brown black-bordered 

 ellipse which is the most abundant shell on the reefs. A large fluted 

 shell, called by the Samoans faigua, is not uncommon, and its flesh is 

 eaten raw by the natives. Many of the shells housed active little hermit 

 crabs, and as we worked about the pools there was a continuous rapid 

 scuttling about of these strangely tenanted houses. 



Less familiar animals were the various marine worms, brilliantly 

 colored nudibranchs and the unsavory looking fleshy masses of large 

 pteropods. One of these salt-water worms looked almost exactly like 

 the familiar fuzzy brown caterpillar of the Isabella moth that scurries 

 about across our sidewalks and pathways in winter time. The most 

 extraordinary, as well as the most famous, worm of the Samoan reefs is 

 that curious creature called the palolo, which with a certain phase of 

 the moon in November of each year appears in myriads in the shallow 

 reef waters and is gathered with feverish haste by the natives as the 

 choicest food of the whole year's finding. To be accurate, they are not 

 the worms themselves which thus appear, but only certain parts of the 

 worm body, the egg-producing parts, which break off from the rest of 

 the worm, lying in crevices in the reef far below the water's surface. 

 Mayer has recently described the similar habits of an Atlantic palolo 

 common on the Dry Tortugas. 



As for the " coral insects " themselves, they have been so often pic- 

 tured and so much written about, that their graceful shapes and mar- 

 velous colors are familiar to all readers. As a matter of fact, we saw 

 curiously little of live coral, and that which we saw was by no means 

 brilliantly colored. The live zone of a coral reef is that part on its 

 outer or seaward margin where the surf is always breaking and the 

 water is pure and clean. The great mass of the reef is composed of dead 

 coral, the shattered, crushed and compacted lime skeletons of millions 

 of dead individuals, and this rock mass, this limestone ledge, is of dirty 

 grayish or brownish white with no beauty of color at all. 



Where we did see all the marvel of color and pattern that one must 

 find on a tropic coral reef, or be sadly disappointed, was in the deeper, 

 larger pools near the seaward edge of the reef. Imagine all the most 

 brilliantly colored and strangely patterned tropic butterflies that you 

 have ever seen pinned up in dead rows in museum cases alive and dis- 

 porting themselves in clear water ! You have before you then in your 

 mind's eye no more extraordinary or beautiful sight than that actually 



