Habits and Adaptations 269 



wildest flight of fancy, exemplified by a certain large and 

 quite ugly deep-sea angler-fish. This animal is a perfect 

 Christmas tree of adaptations. Being an angler, it has the 

 dorsal fin modified into a dangling lure. Being a deep-sea 

 fish, it has, as many deep-sea fish do, phosphorescent organs 

 which light up the darkness in which it lives — whether to 

 signal mates or to lure victims is undetermined. And then it 



Figure 34. FEMALE ANGLER WITH DWARF PARASITIC 

 MALE ATTACHED TO ABDOMEN 



goes a step further and stupefies the rest of the animal king- 

 dom by taking unto itself a parasitic mate. Parasitic not in 

 the manner of some human females: here the parasitism is 

 physical, and is practiced by the male. Anyone who does not 

 believe this may go to the American Museum of Natural 

 History in New York City and look at the model in the 

 Hall of Fishes, made from a gruesome couple captured off 

 the coast of England. The female is forty inches long, her 

 devoted husband four inches long — only one one-thousandth 

 of her weight. 



This species lives at great depths, in complete blackness. 

 Its numbers are few. The chances of a male finding a female 

 are poor, and of his losing her after he has once found her 

 good. What he does, then, if he has the good luck to find a 

 mate, is to make sure that he will never be separated from 



