134 STATISTICS OF LOSS TO THE OYSTER-PLANTERS. 



tober, a planter at Pocasset, Massachusetts, went ont in his boat to look 

 at his oysters, which lay in three to five feet of water. He at once noticed 

 that the star-fishes had made a raid upon him under cover of the storm. 

 Taking an eel-spear as a weapon, he forked up 2500 by actual count 

 within the next two days, and later gathered 500 more. In spite of 

 this they ate up about 300 bushels from his beds alone. Adding what 

 his neighbors suffered, he considers the single week's loss at that point to 

 have been about 1000 bushels, worth $1200. 



At Warren, Rhode Island, I saw once a pile of dead star-fishes, said 

 to amount to 1000 bushels, which had been dredged off the beds in the 

 river there. A bushel of living sea-stars contains from 100 to 200, ac- 

 cording to size — say, 150 on the average. In drying, however, the bulk 

 of a bushel is reduced three-fourths. Therefore this decaying heap, ready 

 to be turned into manure, represented something like 1000 by 150 by 4 = 

 600,000 star-fishes. Suppose them to be the only star-fishes caught in 

 Warren River, and to have eaten only one oyster each before their 

 capture, and we have 600,000 mollnsks, or about 3000 bushels, destroyed. 

 But the oystermen say not one in twenty five-fingers gets caught, and that 

 50,000 bushels would come nearer to each season's loss of young and old 

 oysters, Equally great heaps can be seen at Fairhaven, Conn. 



It is in the latter part of the summer and in the autumn that the star- 

 fish pest occurs in its greatest violence along the Rhode Island and Con- 

 necticut coasts. Then they, themselves, are done with their spawning 

 and have renewed their vigor, and the young of all sorts of mollusks, 

 crabs, and other prey abound upon the shores and invite the five-fingers 

 to an easy repast. It is at this season that the sudden appearance of 

 great bodies of star-fishes make the heart of the planter sink within him ; 

 for he knows that if they once attack a bed of his, they march straight 

 through it, and leave as dead a path as if it had been swept by a fire. It 

 is utterly useless to struggle against them, except by putting on a large 

 force of men and taking up all the oysters on the bed. On more than 

 one occasion steamers have been employed, at a large expense, in order to 

 hasten the work of dredging. To what a great extent this is now done 

 in Long Island Sound, and the enormous depredations committed by this 

 pest upon the oyster fisheries, can be learned by consulting the report 

 for 1884 of the Connecticut Commissioners of Shell Fisheries. 



I was told all along the coast, in order to account for the sudden un- 

 foreseen appearance of these bodies of star-fishes in the midst of an oyster- 

 bed, that they came rolling in from the deep sea in a compact ball, all 

 clinging tightly together. This ball might be a foot in diameter, or as 



