CHAPTER XXVI 



CRUSTACEA 



The fishes in a school of mackerel are as numerous as the birds in a flight 

 of wild pigeons. Goode, in his " History of Aquatic Animals," tells of one 

 school of mackerel which was estimated to contain a million barrels, and 

 of another which was a windrow of fish half a mile wide and at least twenty 

 miles long ; but while the pigeons are plant eaters, the mackerel are rapa- 

 cious hunters, pursuing and devouring the herrings, as well as pteropods and 

 pelagic Crustacea. 



Herring swarm like locusts, and a bank of herring is almost a solid wall. 

 In 1879 three hundred thousand river herring were landed in a single haul 

 of the seine in Albemarle Sound ; but the herring are also carnivorous, each 

 one consuming myriads of copepods every day. In spite of this destruction 

 and the ravages of armies of medusae and siphonophores and pteropods, the 

 fertility of the copepods is so great that they are abundant in all parts of 

 the ocean, and they are met with in numbers which exceed our powers of 

 comprehension. 



On one occasion the Challenger steamed for two days through a dense 

 cloud formed of a single species, and they are found in all latitudes from 

 the Arctic regions to the equator, in masses which discolor the water for 

 miles. We know, too, that they are not restricted to the surface, and that 

 banks of copepods are sometimes a mile thick. When we reflect that thou- 

 sands would find ample room and food in a pint of water, we can form some 

 faint conception of their universal abundance. 



. Modern microscopic research has shown that these simple plants [the alga; 

 in the water], and the globigerinse and radiolarians which feed upon them, 

 are so abundant and prolific that they meet all the demands made upon 

 them and supply the food of all the animals of the ocean. 



This is the fundamental conception of marine biology. The basis of all 

 the life in the modern ocean is to be sought in the microorganisms of the 

 surface. W. K. BROOKS, " Salpa," pp. 146-147 



All the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful 

 men, in the world, with all the old German bogy painters into the bargain, 

 could never invent . . . anything so curious, and so ridiculous, as a lobster. 

 K i N-GSLE Y , " Water Babies ' ' 



285 



