Biologists Study Aimnals and Plants 



Fig. 5 Photographed ojf the Florida coast. What 

 inforjuation can biologists obtain by under- 

 water trips? How else caji they get such infor- 

 mation? (miller dunn co.) 



light casting a beam out into the sur- 

 rounding blackness. 



Long before these methods of study- 

 ing the life of the sea had been de- 

 veloped, other devices were in use. Nets 

 made of steel had been dragged on the 

 bottom of the sea, sometimes as much as 

 three miles down, and then hauled to the 

 surface so that the catch might be 

 studied. Nets had been invented that 

 could be dragged through the water at 

 certain depths and closed before they 

 were pulled in. In this way biologists 



would know, for example, that certain 

 fish live at depths of half a mile, coming 

 no closer to the surface nor going much 

 farther down. Dredges with steel jaws 

 had been dropped to the bottom and 

 closed so that samples of the sand and 

 ooze (mud) could be collected and 

 examined. This disclosed the fact that 

 the thousands of square miles of ocean 

 bottom is the graveyard of tiny animals 

 whose skeletons sank after death. A 

 single one of these tiny animals is too 



small to be seen by the naked eye yet 



'J 



the countless billions that have died 

 have formed thick deposits of this ooze. 

 Thus slowly the labors of many men 

 are making it possible to describe life 

 in the darkness of the ocean depths. 



Exploring nearer home. Not all biolo- 

 gists interested in getting acquainted 

 with plants and animals have wandered 

 to the far corners of the earth to dis- 

 cover and describe them. Many have 

 remained at home, knowing that with 

 patient observation much could be 

 learned about animals and plants nearby. 



One of the most famous of the stay- 

 at-home observers was Jean Henri Fabre 

 (fah'br). For most of the years of his 

 long and useful life Fabre watched the 

 insects in his garden and in the sunny 

 fields. He would crouch, motionless, for 

 long hours at a stretch, intently watch- 

 ing the behavior of some insect. It was 

 by such patient observation that he saw 

 insects hunt food and store it, fight 

 enemies, and mate. He saw how eggs 

 were laid and how they hatched. Then 

 he wrote exact descriptions of what he 

 had seen. He left many simple and inter- 

 esting accounts of his observations; 

 most of them have been translated from 



