round up and regenerate into new anemones. Dia- 

 dumene luciae, a small, slender, greenish anemone 

 striped with yellow or orange, common on both 

 American coasts, expands the basal disk and at- 

 taches it firmly, then pulls up the central portion, 

 leaving behind a ring of small pieces that may re- 

 generate into as many as a dozen or more anemones. 

 It also has a more brutal approach to asexual repro- 

 duction — rupture of the whole body into halves that 

 regenerate. This rapidly spreading anemone prob- 

 ably came originally from Japan, where it repro- 

 duces sexually as well. 



Of the many genera that reproduce asexually, 

 only Gonactinia is known to split across the body; 

 all the others rend themselves lengthwise. This is an 

 unsettling habit at best, and things do not always get 

 divided neatly, so that anemones which divide asex- 

 ually often have unconventional numbers of tenta- 

 cles or mouth grooves or internal partitions. When 

 matters really go astray, an anemone may end with 

 ten or more mouth grooves instead of the more usual 

 two. 



The aggregated anemone, mentioned earlier, 

 forms its colonies by asexual division of the body. 

 The round anemone becomes elliptical and one end 

 keeps moving outward until the stretched anemone 

 is connected in the middle only by a narrow strand 

 that finally breaks. Only uncrowded individuals di- 

 vide, so that in a cluster only the ones around the 



Brain coral in light, with polyps retracted. ( Great 

 Barrier Reef. Fritz Goro: Lije Magazine) 



edge pull apart, and small colonies spread out even- 

 tually into large, crowded beds. 



Regeneration in anemones takes place most read- 

 ily in primitive forms like Harenaciis. the burrowing 

 anemone, which can produce both disk and base 

 from almost any slice of the body. When Metridiivii 

 is cut across the column, the lower piece regenerates 

 a new disk with tentacles; but the upper portion can- 

 not readily produce a new base. Severed tentacles do 

 not usually regenerate, but in Boloceroides, a Japa- 

 nese anemone, the whole set of tentacles is shed and 

 then replaced; and each cast-off tentacle becomes a 

 new anemone. 



It is a memorable day or sunset hour when one 

 comes upon anemones spawning in a tide pool and 

 sees the water turn cloudy with wave upon wave of 

 ejected eggs, or in some species ejected larvae. The 

 little free-swimming larva, oval or pear-shaped, of- 

 ten looks grooved along the attachments of the in- 

 ternal partitions. It develops a mouth but usually 

 does not push out tentacles until after it settles down. 

 Retaining the developing eggs in the digestive cavity 

 to the larval stage or even beyond is only one method 

 for prolonging maternal protection of the young. A 

 small red sea anemone, Epiaciis proUjera, common 

 on eelgrass in Puget Sound but known all down the 

 American Pacific coast, is frequently found with a 

 complete circle of juvenile anemones in special brood 

 pouches around the middle of the external surface of 

 the column (Plate 16). 



Usually we can only guess at the age of an anem- 

 one, for extended observations on particular anem- 

 ones in nature are rare. The late W. K. Fisher, when 

 he was director of the Hopkins Marine Laboratory 

 at Pacific Grove, California, did observe some large 

 green anemones that occupied the same crevice for 

 at least thirty years. But the laurels for known lon- 

 gevity all go to captive anemones tended by me- 

 thodical Scots. In The Great Barrier Reef, Dakin 

 tells of Dalyell, a Scottish laird and fine naturalist, 

 who about 1827 collected an Actinia from a rock 

 pool at North Berwick and kept it in a little bowl, 

 feeding it on bits of oyster or mussel and changing its 

 water regularly. Finally known as Granny, it outlived 

 Dalyell and three successive caretakers; and when 

 things finally went wrong and it died, it was given a 

 newspaper obituary notice half a column long. An 

 even more famous batch of anemones, long identi- 

 fied as Sugariia and later as Cereiis, were said to 

 have been collected as full-grown anemones some 

 time prior to 1 862, and for many years lovingly 

 tended by a lady who fed them fresh liver. They were 

 finally given to the Department of Zoology at the 

 University of Edinburgh, and there they thrived and 

 budded until something went amiss and they were 

 all simultaneously found dead in about 1940 or 

 1942. At that time they were at least eighty years 



