322 WILSON GEE 



not allowing the food to be swallowed, and says with regard to 

 her experiments : ' The fatigue thus caused usually lasts only 

 two to five minutes. After this period has elapsed the fatigued 

 region is frequently* as ready to take food as before — provided 

 the animal is still hungry."* My experience was, however, that 

 in some cases, as many as seven hours were required for the 

 animal to recover responsiveness sufficient to accept food given 

 to the tentacles. In no case where the. animal had been thor- 

 oughly fed until it refused to accept food with the tentacles of 

 any part of the disk did I succeed in getting animals to accept 

 food more than twice after a period of five to ten minutes, and 

 these cases were comparatively rare. The fact that the anemone 

 will accept food after this short period of rest is what might be 

 expected to be the case, since the juices of the food are not suffi- 

 ciently strong to entirely exhaust the tentacles through mucus 

 secretion as the stronger substances have been shown to do. 

 One or more partial recoveries before complete exhaustion is 

 what might be looked for even in the matter of mucus secre- 

 tion. This being the case, I think that there is no necessity for 

 the belief that this reaction is due to the fact that the animal 

 is "still hungry," but rather that it is due to the rallying power 

 of the tentacles before complete exhaustion. 



FEEDING REACTIONS IN NORMAL HABITAT 



A two weeks' stay at the Hopkins Sea Side Laboratory, Pacific 

 Grove, California during a period when the tides were excep- 

 tionally favorable permitted not only observations on the normal 

 food habits of the anemones recorded in a previous portion of 

 this paper, but also an opportunity to try the effects of injecting 

 the specimens in the tide-pools with certain of the substances 

 used in the laboratory experiments. 



After injecting specimens in an expanded condition in the 

 pockets among the rocks at low tide with the same strength of 

 beef juice previously used, there was noted the same excessive 

 secretion of mucus, almost total irresponsiveness to stimulation, 

 and total neglect of food on the part of the tentacles as was 

 found in the specimens kept in the laboratory. Potassium 

 chloride gave even more marked results of depression than the 



* Italics mine. 



