SLUMBERERS OF THE SURGE 309 



cuckoos gather about grazing cattle, to snatch the 

 disturbed grasshoppers, so, on the outskirts of the 

 surgeon herd, small wrasse persons and others 

 frisked about, darting in to seize some crab or 

 shrimp which the scraping teeth of the grazing fish 

 had dispossessed. Again, as in grazing herds of 

 antelope in Africa, a zebra will now and then be 

 found, so here, mingled in the depths of the three 

 hundred odd, I saw several white-striped angel- 

 fish and as many of my old friends, the yellow- 

 tailed Xesurus (Fig. 45). 



Fish such as these I take as types of my Grazers 

 — Coral Grazers in particular. My study of the 

 yellow-tailed surgeons applies, with slight changes, 

 to the others — fish which swim slowly about, often 

 in large schools, usually at a low level near the coral 

 or rocks. They are apparently well protected by 

 the poisonous spines on various parts of the body 

 and show no fear of other fish. They may be 

 somber in general body color but they always have 

 some conspicuous mark or patch of color, such as 

 the yellow tail of Xesurus, the white tail of aliala, 

 and the black bands in another surgeon ( Fig. 43 ) . 

 But however they dift'er in size, color or sociability, 

 they have one thing in common — their teeth. 



One glance at the mouth of a lion, a horse or a 

 rabbit tells us much of their ways of life and their 

 food, and no one could ever mistake the teeth of 

 a surgeonfish for those of a shark or even a snap- 

 per. My Grazers, judged by their teeth, fell into 

 four general types, the Hands-and-feet, the Chisel 

 or Horse-toothed, the Stockades and the Parrots. 



