128 Objects of Interest on the Sea Shore. 



should be done in as safe a place as possible, and from 

 observations made on the Colvend shore, he was inclined to 

 think they burrowed. When clad in their armour crabs were 

 ruthless robbers and pirates. No living thing which they could 

 tackle was safe, and they would as soon make a meal of a small 

 member of their own family as not. Crabs were great scavengers, 

 and he was not sure they didn't rather like their food a little 

 high. They were largely nocturnal in their habits. When sitting 

 among the rocks waiting for duck at dusk he heard them coming 

 out as it got dark, and they made such a crunching that one 

 almost thought the rocks were crumbling away. He had dis- 

 tinctly felt the stone on which he had been sitting shaken by a 

 crab underneath it ; so they must be very strong. There was no 

 doubt that the large rats one saw on the sea shore ate crabs. 

 The only two occasions on which he had known rats to attack 

 human beings in the open had been on the sea shore. A cornered 

 rat would sometimes show fight, but a single field or farmyard 

 rat never would, as long as it could run away. On both occa- 

 sions the attack was provoked in precisely the same way. One 

 occurred at Heston, and the other on Rough Isle. While wait- 

 ing for a shot among the rocks a rat was noticed prowling round. 

 A stone being handy, what more naturel than to throw it ? The 

 result was altogether unlocked for — the rat with very evident 

 signs of rage charged straight at the thrower, who had to use his 

 gun in self-defence. When unprovoked, the shore-frequenting 

 rat was quite harmless, and he had often had them running about 

 within a yard or two of him, and on more than one occasion, 

 when Iving prone among the rocks, they had run over his body. 

 One of the most striking things to be found at the edge of the tide 

 was the star fish. The mouth was in the centre of the underside 

 of the body. The underside of the arms was covered with hun- 

 dreds of transparent flexible tubes, which were the creature's feet. 

 Star fishes were voracious creatures, and acted as scavengers. 

 They fed on any meat or fish which they found, and also on shell 

 fish of various kinds, being particularly fond of oysters and 

 mussels. Sometimes there was a dreadful epidemic among star 

 fish, and he had seen the rocks on the south side of Heston 

 covered with thousands of them, making the shore look quite pink- 

 from a short distance away. Star fish were able to discard a limb 



