312 IN LOWER FLORIDA WILDS 



that display themselves so recklessly owe their 

 safety partly to their swiftness and to the fact that 

 they stick pretty closely to shelter. Let a shark 

 or barracuda appear and like a flash they are 

 gone or out of sight. Some of these reef fishes 

 have the chameleon-like power to alter their colors 

 to harmonize with the bottom or the corals about 

 them. Longley has made photographs of reef 

 loving hog fishes (Lachnolaimus maximus) show- 

 ing different color phases; a lighter, more uniform 

 color is assumed while hovering over sand and a 

 darker mottled tone and pattern when close to 

 broken corals and among gorgonians. 



Some reef mollusks have highly colored shells 

 and their flesh is perfectly palatable. Now it 

 would require a day for them to cover the same 

 distance a fish would in two seconds, indeed some 

 are fixed to their places and cannot move away at 

 all. If these were conspicuously scattered over the 

 floor of the reef, as the newspaper article set forth, 

 such helpless creatures would not last a day; they 

 would be exterminated between sunrise and sun- 

 set. Though the reef mollusks are comparatively 

 few in species and numbers, they are nevertheless 

 there but the ordinary observer does not see them. 



