FISHES OF OUR NORTH ATLANTIC SEABOARD 
21 
themselves unbidden guests, which the un¬ 
easy host can cast ofF only when it molts. 
Grain-eating birds swallow their food 
whole and, with the aid of gravel or other 
hard material, pulverize it in their giz¬ 
zards. The Lobster handles the situation 
differently. It chews its food before 
passing it into its mouth. The cutting 
teeth of its outer mouth parts chop the 
material into mincemeat, which is passed 
into the mouth proper in a slow stream 
of fine particles. From there the food 
reaches the stomach, which is divided 
into two parts—the forward section for 
storage and the rear compartment for 
sorting, straining, and digesting the food. 
Between the two are three teeth, one 
upper and two lower, which, like upper 
and nether millstones, grind the food to 
its appropriate degree of fineness. 
WHAT SELF-AMPUTATION MEANS 
When one examines a Lobster care¬ 
fully it is seen that the two great claws do 
not terminate alike. The one ends with 
a large crushing type of pincers and the 
other with a seizing type. One of the 
strange things in connection with these 
great claws is that Nature has given the 
Lobster power not only to amputate them 
in case of danger, but to grow others in 
their place after amputation occurs. 
Imagine a man with his hand caught in 
a machine suddenly giving a severe jerk 
and severing his arm at the elbow! And 
then imagine him going off to himself 
and growing another arm to take the 
place of the lost one! That is compara¬ 
ble to what the Lobster does. 
In a census of more than 700 Lobsters, 
7 per cent were found to have thrown 
one or both great claws, and these showed 
every stage of the regenerative process. 
Nature has arranged matters so that no 
tendons or large blood vessels cross the 
breaking point, hence there is little bleed¬ 
ing at the operation. 
That the self-amputation of the claw 
is a matter of will is shown by the fact 
that when put under an anaesthetic, the 
Lobster “forgets” to amputate the cap¬ 
tive member. 
GLUING HER EGGS FAST TO HER BODY 
When the female Lobster lays her eggs 
she turns over on her back, using her 
large claws and her tail-fan as a tripod 
to support herself. She flexes her abdo¬ 
men to make a sort of pocket, to which 
she glues the eggs fast. An 8-inch female 
will lay about 5,000 eggs, a lo-inch indi¬ 
vidual about 10,000, and a 19-inch one 
some 75,000, there being about 6,000 eggs 
to the ounce (see page ii). 
MANY MYSTERIES OF THE SEA 
The eggs are carried about for ten 
months. After hatching, the larvae spend 
from three to five weeks irresponsibly 
floating around near the surface, some¬ 
what lacking in the powers of coordina¬ 
tion and orientation. During this time 
they undergo four molts. At the third 
molt after hatching the Lobsters begin 
to take on the characteristics of the adult. 
At this stage the instinct to desert the 
surface and seek the bottom suddenly 
asserts itself, and the Lobsterling settles 
down to. its new environment to eat and 
grow, reaching maturity in five or six 
years. 
While the ocean literally teems with 
life, man has learned to make compara¬ 
tively small use of it, and the list of fishes 
fit for food is infinitely longer than the list 
of food fishes. The things yet to be 
found out about marine creatures are 
vastly more numerous than the things 
already discovered. 
Imagine a race living somewhere on 
table-lands towering above our atmos¬ 
phere, and possessing craft lighter than 
swan’s-down; and then imagine them 
launching out on the surface of the oceans 
of air, with clouds forever shutting out a 
view of the earth below. 
Now and then one of their craft might 
drop a dredge. The sounding tube might 
sink into the soil of a cornfield or the 
mud of a river bank. 
LIFE UNDER INCONCEIVABLE PRESSURE 
The dredge might capture a bumblebee 
or a butterfly. It might conceivably get 
a field mouse or a pine cone. But, what¬ 
ever it got, how little that would be com¬ 
pared with the vast number of things that 
would escape! 
And so it is with our knowledge of the 
sea and the vast numbers of creatures 
that inhabit its depths! Even on the 
floor of the deepest trench in the abysmal 
region of the sea’s bottom, where no ray 
of light ever reaches, where Stygian dark¬ 
ness is perpetual, where all but freezing 
temperatures never cease, and where in- 
