THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



with blood. These patches were found to be formed of 

 rotifers, of the same kind which were commonest among 

 the weed in winter. The red stains appear to rise owing 

 to their rapid multipKcation, and to their fixing them- 

 selves side by side as close as they can pack. The photo- 

 graph shows a small part of one of these stains trans- 

 ferred by a brush to the microscope sHde. 



In Coast Lake the largest of these patches of rotifers 

 would not be more than an inch in diameter, but Priestley 

 tells us that in a lake on the west side of the Sound they 

 formed patches " as large as a man's head " and of appre- 

 ciable thickness. Though this rotifer usually attaches 

 itself by the foot when feeding, many of them let go their 

 hold and go swimming in the water, so that when water 

 from any of these lakes is taken for driking it can be seen 

 that there is a fair sprinkling of red grains in it which 

 must be swallowed with the water. 



In summer, too, in very shallow ponds and trickling 

 streams an alga of a brownish-green colour grows in large 

 translucent sheets. 



Life in the Ice 



As soon as animals were obtained from the weed 

 enclosed in the ice in the manner described above, it was 

 obvious that mere freezing did not kill them. They were 

 first got in the shallow lakes, where the weed could be seen 

 through the transparent ice at the margins. There were 

 plenty in all the shallow lakes. A shaft was sunk through 

 fifteen feet of ice to the bottom of Blue Lake. There 

 was a film of yellow weed covering the gravel of which 

 the bottom was composed, and on this weed several kinds 

 of rotifers were found alive. This fact seemed more 

 remarkable later, when we found that Blue Lake did not 

 melt during the two summers that we spent at Cape 



238 



