THE AMERICAN LOBSTER. 123 



At the lobster pound in Vinal Haven, Maine, which I visited on August 20, 1893, 



1 examined a number of lobsters whose bodies and free appendages supported a 

 surprisingly varied flora. A hard-shelled female which I took out of the mud in 

 very shallow water was decorated with algae in a very striking fashion upon the upper 

 pari of the body, the big claws, and antenna;. The long whip-like "feelers" were 

 weighed down with fronds of the brown laniinaria, or devil's apron, as shown in 

 fig. IIS, plate 30. The common green lettuce ( Ulva latuca) was sprinkled freely over 

 various parts, and barnacles had gained also a foothold upon the shell. A frond of 

 laminaria, which was fixed to the side of the abdomen, was 7 inches long and 2 to 3 

 inches in width. Besides the larger fronds, there was a- matted undergrowth upon 

 the antennae, composed of several species of algae and attached fungi. One of the 

 men employed at this pound said that he had taken hard-shell lobsters with "kelp" 



2 feet long growing upon the shell. 



A lobster now in the Peabody Museum of Yale University was incrusted with 

 Nnllipores, when it was captured in Nantucket in April, 1880. This specimen was 

 a male and weighed about 10 pounds. 



Mussels sometimes glue themselves in extraordinary numbers to the under sides 

 of the bodies of living lobsters, in places where the animal is unable to scratch them 

 off. A good illustration of this may be seen in the museum of the Peabody Academy 

 of Science at Salem, Massachusetts, where there is a male hard-shelled lobster about 

 12 inches long with fifty or more shells of the common Mytilus edulis attached to its 

 body. The shells of some of these bivalves are li inches long. They have wedged 

 themselves between the bases of the thoracic legs, the plates of the tail-fan, and have 

 fastened themselves even to the head between the antennae and about the eyes. 



It is not uucommon to find the barnacle (Balanus bakinoides), as we have already 

 seen, attached to the shell of both very old and relatively young lobsters (fig. 1, plate 

 1). The large Belfast lobster carried about with it several species of mollusks, as 

 well as barnacles and hydroids. 



On July 15, 1891, 1 fouud a lobster which had been kept for several days, or perhaps 

 for a louger time, in a floatiug car, with one of its eyes completely hooded by a colony 

 of bryozoa. When set free, the eye appeared perfectly normal. 



The messmates of the young lobster consist chiefly of fungi (of which bacteria are 

 the most characteristic) and of diatoms. Young lobsters captured at sea seem to be 

 peculiarly free from foreign matter of every kind, but when the young of almost any of 

 the Crustacea are confined they soon become clogged with solid organic or inorganic 

 floating particles and bacteria with which such material is invariably associated. The 

 hairs which garnish the body and appendages of crustacean larvae serve to gather 

 up and hold solid particles from the water, so that one of the first considerations in 

 the artificial rearing of Crustacea is to give them as clean a water supply as possible. 



I have seen larvae in the fifth stage of development literally covered with a mass 

 of diatoms (Tabelaria, Navicula, etc.) like those found in the brown sediment at the 

 bottom of the jar in which they lived and in the undigested food contained in their 

 stomachs. Old lobsters, in which the molting period has become very infrequent, 

 are commonly the worst sufferers from enemies of this kind, but the physiological 

 condition of the animal is, as we have seen, the most important consideration. 



The crayfish, which is devoured eagerly by numerous species of fish in fresh-water 

 lakes and rivers, both in this country and iu Europe, is infested by Trematode worms, 

 which become encysted in the tissues of the animal. Bistomum nodulosum has been 



