Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/134

130 the sea here almost like an inland lake, and gives none of the many tide-pools which constitute such an important part of the collecting grounds in our American stations.

In the two laboratories there are many large and small aquaria, with such an abundant supply of sea-water that animals from a good sized shark to the most delicate coral polyp will live in contentment. The frontispiece from a painting by Fru Astrid Gullstrand represents a corner of one aquarium. The orange colored anemone, like a veritable flower, unfolds its stinging tentacles to entrap the unwary minute animals swimming by, while below, the eleven-rayed sun-star pulls itself by the contraction of hundreds of adhering sucking tube-feet. With sharp pincers the spider-crab has broken off pieces of algae and hydroid colonies and then planted them among the bristles on its back. Thus the creature is completely masked both from the game it hunts and its own carnivorous foes. The edible mussel spins strong threads from its byssus gland firmly attaching the bluish, or sometimes brownish, shell to the rock or to another mussel. Protectively colored by the olive green alga around the stem of which his prehensile tail is entwined, Nerophis, the needle-fish, as a model father, broods his young, which are glued fast to his ventral surface during development.