246 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Professor C. A. Kofoid, of the University of California, has designed 

 a small, surface tow net, made of fine bolting silk, to collect the swarms 

 of minute animals — salpae, medusas, arthropoda and the metamorphic 

 forms of other groups — which are always found at the surface of the 

 open sea or a few feet below it. While making a bottom haul, this small 

 net is usually towed from the ship's side for half an hour, and the con- 

 tents are washed out into a jar as a gelatinous, unrecognizable mass to 

 be sorted over in the laboratory at Washington later. 



Much of the collecting work of the Albatross has been done along 

 clear beaches and in rivers with seines drawn by a crew of six or eight 

 men. The boat used on these expeditions is a round-bottomed, keel- 

 less shell of Norwegian model, called a " praam," a craft which is easily 

 held against currents, but which drifts readily with the wind, and which 

 shows on the whole a more unmanageable disposition than any other of 

 the ship's small boats, until one has learned how to trim the boat and to 

 pull it with even oar. Then one realizes how well suited this boat is for 

 knocking about in swamps and rivers and on the beaches. 



But more sweeping than any of these other methods of collecting is 

 dynamiting the fish which congregate in great numbers on the coral 

 reefs. Peering through a water glass, or glass-bottomed bucket, over 

 the stern of a small boat, one plants a shot which is exploded by an 

 electric fuse. The fish are either stunned or killed by the explosion 

 and rise to the surface, dotting it with flecks of red, green, yellow, or 

 chocolate brown. Many more fish sink to the bottom, the degree of the 

 congestion of the internal organs due to the explosion and the bursting 

 of the swim-bladder apparently causing the fish to sink. Amid more or 

 less excitement the fish on the surface are speedily gathered in and the 

 boat devotes itself to the more prosaic work of picking up the fish on the 

 bottom with the aid of the water glass and an unweildy bamboo spear. 

 Although one can not but regret the waste of many fish killed by dyna- 

 mite for every specimen sent to the museum, this method is justified 

 because it is the only means by which many species can possibly be 

 taken, which must otherwise remain unknown. 



There is, however, one small wrasse fish (Labroides paradiseus 

 Bleeker) about as long as one's finger, which fearlessly flaunts .its dark 

 blue tail among the coral branches as the dynamite shot is being placed, 

 and which even more saucily hovers near the jagged and broken coral 

 after the shot has been fired. One's pride in his catch is humbled still 

 further on meeting a silent, half-naked native poling his flimsy bamboo 

 raft homeward with his basket filled with fish similar to those in the 

 dynamite boat. The native has taken his fish in the early morning, 

 before the breeze has ruffled the surface of the bay, without the help 

 of dynamite or of water glass, and with only a slender, iron-tipped spear 

 of his own rude contriving with which he has speared his fish alive. 



