SKIMMING THE SURFACE 



A curious feature of the parasitic copepods is that the 

 male is often a mere pygmy attached to the female. He 

 may in fact be as tiny compared with her as she is com- 

 pared with the animal upon which she preys. Their 

 ''attachment" is a fantastic instance of the "little-fleas- 

 have-lesser-fleas-and-so-on" principle in nature. 



Free-swimming copepods, making up the greater 

 part of planktonic life, are (despite the ugly habits of 

 their parasitic relatives) among the most beautiful 

 creatures in the sea. Their feathered antennae often 

 exceed in length the dimensions of their bodies, and their 

 lovely tail extensions have been compared with peacock's 

 feathers. In some of these crustaceans an intense scarlet 

 will merge into a brilliant blue, while others have differ- 

 ent colour effects — many rivalling the rainbow in har- 

 mony and brilliance. 



Copepods and other small sea organisms are filtered 

 out of the flying-fish's inflowing respiratory stream by a 

 series of fine ''rakers" set on its gill arches. So with 

 numerous other creatures which consume quantities of 

 plankton — filters of all kinds are used to retain the 

 essential food and strain off the water. 



Even the massive ocean sunfish, which grows to as 

 much as a ton in weight, feeds on small creatures like 

 jellyfish and tiny crustaceans, with masses of other kinds 

 of plankton, as it drifts lazily on the surface. In the North 

 Atlantic the sunfish also consumes millions of the leaf- 

 like larvae of certain eels, but always its staple diet is 

 plankton. 



Curiously enough, there is a tendency among the 

 largest sea mammals and fishes to live on herbivorous 

 planktonic animals (the "vegetarians" in the plankton), 

 which means that they come as close as they can to an 

 assimilation of "living energy". The vegetable plankton 

 is the start of the various food-chains in the ocean 

 and it seems to give the creatures who are the greatest 

 consumers of it enormous power. Marine turtles, for 



49 



