LOWER COASTAL ANIMALS I33 



A clutch of octopus eggs on a 

 piece of saturated driftwood. 

 Gulf of Panama, gij metres. 



the fact that the broken sponge at once becomes a porous, semi-cohesive 

 mass with the consistency of cotton-wool seeped with mud, and this made 

 itself a regular nuisance by blocking our filters and wrapping itself round 

 all our specimens. 



Still, our trawls over the continental slope were among the most interest- 

 ing, and we may fittingly close this chapter with an account of our big 

 trawl at goo metres in the Gulf of Panama. This is a northern extension 

 of the region off the west coast of South America, the region with the 

 richest organic production in the world. And our hopes of a good haul 

 were not disappointed; in order to save our net we had to split up the 

 catch into four parts while it was still in the water. There were plenty 

 of both fishes and prawns, which latter seem here to live near the bottom. 

 We had also got the remains of feather-stars, a dozen starfishes, some 

 sea-cucumbers, two species of large sea-anemones, and — strange to relate 

 ■ — - a lump of half-rotted wood with a large clutch of the white, oblong 

 egg capsules of an octopus adhering to it. If there were few molluscs and 

 other small creatures, this was doubtless because our coarse-meshed gear 

 had been for too long suspended in the surface layers. Among a fair 

 number of crustaceans from the bottom were two squat lobsters (Gala- 

 thea), five species of the related Munida, and some hermit crabs with 

 their scarlet eggs. Sorting all these out was a race against time, as putre- 

 faction takes place quickly in the tropical heat and we could not be sure 

 that there were no rarities at the bottom until we had got everything out. 

 By concentrated effort we managed to get the last of our specimens into 

 preservatives in under four hours. 



