Page:Midland naturalist (IA midlandnaturalis01lond).pdf/286

 It is most important that students should know what a field this and cognate rotifers offer for study, and that the subject is very far from being exhausted. The question of the mate alone is nearly untouched, and, with high powers at command, it ought to be a very productive and interesting subject. I was so fortunate as to see what I believe was the male of Melicerta in last November. I was examining a very fine female specimen, which was freely out and briskly engaged, when from the tube there emerged a small free swimming rotifer. In point of size it was net quite as long as one of the larger lobes of the female; the tube of the female in length would make about six of it, It was very active, and it bent its body into must graceful and rapidly changing curves; its ciliary disk was totally unlike that of the female, its tail also was wholly unlike the female's, fer while the female has a sucker foot to fix on to a weed, this specimen had a forked tail, of which it made constant use, opening the forks like pincers to nip the objects to which it attached itself. Its first action alone was enough to beget the idea of its gender, It began to woo and caress the lobes of the female in the most active and elegant manner; if seemed almost as if it was nibbling the main wreath of cilia of the female.

Now, to any one accustomed to watch Melicerta, it must be always a matter of astonishment to see such a timid, nervous rotifer allow another to touch the cilia with impunity, but in this instance the female never flinched in any way, but accepted the attentions of the little visitor with perfect composure, and continued to feed as if quite undisturbed by its presence. The free rotifer almost immediately afterwards sailed away, and I soon lost it, though not before I had seen enough of it to conclude that had I pact with if as a stranger, and not known whence it came, I should have at once set it down fer one of the numerous members of the family Hydatinæ, I regret to say here that I have never contrived to attain to a knowledge of names— at least in the rotifer world—and I have always estimated an object above its name, and a fact above a now object. The desire of being godfather to a new animal is apt to lead us into fruitless paths, while the love of facts about old ones never does.

Knowing Melicerta go well, I was quite sure she would net lave permitted such liberties us I had witnessed without good cause. The mere circumstance of a rotifer making its appearance from her tube was unusual, and a rotifer with a forked tail doubly so. The ordinary female egg leaves the tube in a footless and very imperfectly developed condition, while Melicerta is not an animal to allow strange rotifers to visit its tube without resentment, The time of year struck me also as special, for I had never examined Melicerta so late in the year before, Throughout last December and January, I obtained specimens from Mr. Bolton, and broke the tubes up to examine their contents, and I was so fortunate as to find ten more of the same free swimming rotifer in about fifty tubes, and under circumstances which leave little doubt in my mind as to its nature and sex. I