REPRODUCTION AND SEX 507 



selves, but get their food from the resources of the community. 

 The drones of a beehive are not lazy, as is usually believed; they 

 fly about in the precincts of the hive with great energy and great 

 expectations. Functionally, one of them is essential to inseminate 

 the queen on her nuptial flight — the fertilised eggs developing into 

 queens and workers, the unfertilised developing into drones. But if 

 we consider these drone's — ^with mothers but no fathers — from the 

 social point, of view, they are parasites. They do not work for their 

 living, but depend on the food the workers gather. 



In the first of Mr. Tate Regan's Ceratioid Anglers, a fish from the 

 Arctic Ocean, two small males were attached to the belly of the 

 female, and the Danish naturalist Saemundsson, who noticed them 

 first, not unnaturally thought they were young ones. The female 

 was about eight inches long; the male about two and half inches. 

 In the second case, from the Gulf of Panama, the female, about 

 two and a half inches long, bore a pigmy male, under half an inch 

 in length, on the top of her head, which seems a strange location. 

 In the third case, from the Western Atlantic, the female carried a 

 pigmy husband below her gill cover. 



The British Museum expert seems to attribute the dwarfness to 

 the parasitism, but perhaps it is easier to start with the occurrence 

 of dwarf males, such as occur in not a few fishes. If such a dwarf, 

 much handicapped in the struggle for existence, fastened in its 

 youth on to a female, there would probably be an individual arrest- 

 ment of growth. Variations in the direction of economy, such as a 

 much-reduced food canal and a suppression of the lure and the 

 teeth, would be favoured in the course of natural selection. We 

 suggest that the dwarfing was not the secondary result of the 

 parasitism, but rather its primary cause. 



The Story of Bonellia. — ^This is one of the strangest of bio- 

 logical stories, profoundly suggestive in more ways than one. 

 Bonellia is a peculiar worm, not uncommon in the Mediterranean, 

 and occasionally occurring in the North Sea. The best known 

 species, Bonellia viridis, is marked by a fine green colour, due to a 

 pigment called bonellein. The female has a body about the size of 

 a prune, and this is ensconced in a hole in a rock or among stones. 

 From the mouth there extends a long string-like proboscis, which 

 may be as much as two feet in length and divides into two at the 

 free end. It is used for probing about in search of food, and is very 

 contractile. But while the female Bonellia is conspicuous enough, 

 the male is hard to find. For he is microscopic, and lives in what 

 may be called the reproductive duct of the female. This is an extra- 

 ordinary case of sex-dimorphism and also of sex-parasitism. The 

 pigmy male has no mouth and must absorb such food as it needs 

 through its ciliated surface. 



In 1914, Dr. H. Baltzer, a Swiss zoologist, discovered another 



