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 fish^ 

 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 moUusks 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 oves, 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 comparativdy 

 few in species and numbers, they are nevertheless 

 there but the ordinary observer does not see them. 



