BATTLEFIELD OF THE SHORE 



The floating population of the incoming tide is 

 of indirect but of great importance to our shore 

 zone. No tide ever goes out that it does not leave 

 at least one stranded and wrecked jellyfish on the 

 sand. Of all aquatic beings this is the most wholly 

 unadapted to a life in any other element. We see 

 one of these beautiful creatures throbbing slowly 

 through the water — a round transparent or trans- 

 lucent sun, with disk, vein-like channels, tentacles, 

 poison darts, eye-spots, nerves, mouth, stomach, 

 eggs — every mechanism of life, and an hour later 

 a thin, glairy, glistening film on the sand is all that 

 is left. That we are three-fourths water is marvel 

 enough, but the living, active, successful race of jel- 

 lies is only one half of one per cent animal matter. 



The thought of a jellyfish coming ashore and run- 

 ning on the sand or scampering up the rocks on the 

 tips of its tentacles is worthy of a place only in a fan- 

 tasy of Dunsany. A still wilder and more fantastic 

 tale could be written of a jelly which, envious of a 

 shore life and aware of its own watery quintessence, 

 regards the success of the fast-rooted seaweeds and 

 thereafter deposits eggs which hatch and sprout 

 into comely plants whose fruit is piles of infant jelly 

 saucers. Only in this case, the tale, censored of an- 

 thropomorphic allusion, is a scientific truth. A jelly 

 can never learn anything of static seashore life, 

 but its mother and its daughter — hydroids we call 

 them — might tell it much about the rhythmic 

 swing, back and forth, of waves crashing in, and 

 all that has to do with tides. 



89 



