SPONGES 



I had to leave them at this point and in the morn- 

 ing four of the right-handed shrimps were dead, 

 the fifth quite disabled, while the left-handed 

 inchling d'Artagnan was triumphantly waiting to 

 attack me if I came too close. He had lost one 

 of his second pair of legs, although he did not 

 appear to know it. The snapping is thus but an 

 empty threat or a challenge while the sabre swing 

 of the whole claw is a most efficient gesture of 

 offence. 



Most of the clan of Alpheus live their lives in 

 crevices of coral or under sea-weed, and are clad 

 in brilliant colors, while their brethren in the black 

 catacombs of the sponge have shed their useless 

 Joseph's coats, and are garbed in pale lemon or 

 ivory-white with only rags of rosy trimmings and 

 claw decorations as hints of former glories. In 

 still more important ways they have become 

 adapted to their new environment. I have cap- 

 tured a blue and violet female snapping shrimp on 

 coral, only a few feet away from the giant sponge, 

 which had nearly five hundred eggs in her pouch. 

 These hatch into tiny, swimming larvae, the first 

 stages, as in the fiddlers, known as zoea, and the 

 later ones as megalops. After considerable time 

 spent in swimmmg, day and night, carried perhaps 

 far away on tidal currents, they settle down to 

 adult snapping-shrimphood, adjusting themselves 

 to almost any kind of reef bottom. But in the 

 sponge shrimps, the females never carry more than 

 twenty eggs, sometimes only seven, all large. In 



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