CORAL JUNGLES OF SEA-COW REEF 



When my sea-cucumber and I had rested from 

 our unusual experience, I examined him more 

 attentively. I got out a key to West Indian sea- 

 cucumbers and from the fact that he was over a 

 foot in length, lived in the mud, was olive-buff 

 dotted thickly with clove-brown, and the happy 

 possessor of twenty tentacles, and with hundreds 

 of tube feet arranged in three series, I was able 

 to call him by his correct scientific name, Stichopus 

 moehii. For an organism which, in the bloom of 

 perfect health resembles a giant maggot, the 

 euphony of this binomial is not amiss. 



A new lot of fish was calling for my attention, 

 but I neglected them for a few minutes longer. I 

 took a lens and surveyed more carefully my fellow 

 tenant of ten fathoms down. His skin was knobby 

 and thorny and olive and brown, and in a hundred 

 places I saw tiny stems supporting circles of delicate 

 tentacles. At first I thought of these as some 

 minute structure of the holothurian itself. Then 

 I took a pair of forceps and, almost at a touch, off 

 came the hydra. More and more and more 

 hydras were found — lowly cousins of sea anemones, 

 living happily on this great creature, as gnats 

 might perch upon an elephant. I placed four 

 hydras under my microscope, and the very first 

 one I looked at had a bulging parasite near the 

 middle of a tentacle. "And so ad infinitum" I 

 chanted, then turned the cucumber over to my 

 preparateur, and began on my fish. 



One windy day we took the motor boat and went 



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