THE SINISTER GEPHALOPODS 



white, is gracefully balanced upon long slender arms, and 

 the creature waves these like a pirouetting fairy, only 

 occasionally touching the sandy floor with their tips. 



Perhaps the most remarkable of all the cephalopods is 

 the argonaut, or paper nautilus [Argonauta argo) an 

 animal so exquisitely beautiful that it seems quite unre- 

 lated to the octopus, yet its eight arms and other charac- 

 teristics indicate their near kinship. Its delicate and fragile 

 paper shell, or ''boat", is famed in legend, song and story. 



The poetical ideas which clustered around the nautilus 

 during classic times and in the Middle Ages were as 

 mythical as they were romantic. Until the middle of the 

 nineteenth century the argonaut or paper nautilus was a 

 baffling mystery, for although the creature was known 

 to be a lady, and always mentioned as ''she", no one had 

 the faintest idea how the animals reproduced themselves, 

 for no one had ever seen a male. 



In 1827, Stefano delle Chiaje discovered a small 

 creature — it looked like a parasitic worm — attached to 

 an argonaut. A few years passed and the great naturalist 

 Cuvier examined five more worms and concluded that 

 they were parasites, constituting a genus quite unknown 

 to science. Each of these "worms" resembled the arm of 

 a cephalopod — it was about five inches long and had a 

 number of suckers, varying from about fifty to just over a 

 hundred. Cuvier named the new genus Hectocotylus — "the 

 arm of a hundred suckers". Other naturalists and 

 biologists examined the "parasite" in after years, but 

 none suspected the truth and the dual mystery remained : 

 "Was there a male argonaut?" and "How did the 

 creature reproduce itself?" 



The Swiss biologist Albert Kolliker began an intensive 

 study of the "parasite" and pubHshed papers in 1845 and 

 1846 in which he pointed out that the "worm" had a 

 small cavity in which he had found sperm cells resembling 

 those of a cephalopod. By 1849 Kolliker had convinced 

 himself that he had found the male argonaut, for he pro- 



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