Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/87

Rh intimate acquaintance with uncouth crawling things of the sea, made visible for an hour in their shallow prison pools. Not all uncouth, either, for of marvels of color and pattern, bizarre and beautiful, there was never lack.

In echinoderms, that is, star fishes, brittle stars, sea-urchins and sea cucumbers, the Samoan reef is very rich. I think we took some two dozen species. An abundant star fish is ultramarine blue, with slender, smooth-surfaced rays. A curious large, reddish-brown, ugly-seeming kind has heavy coarse spines an inch or more long, scattered over it, and these spines sting. Many specimens of the brilliant blue star fish were found with arms slightly or badly mutilated, but all regenerating. I have some specimens by me now which show that even a part of a single arm can regenerate all the rest of the body, that is, a new disc and four new arms besides the remainder of the single mutilated arm.

Of slender-rayed brittle stars there are brown and green and mottled sorts, some with white cross bands on each arm, and all with the fragile arms breaking away with the least roughness in handling. Often merely the contact with the preserving fluids seems to be sufficient for a general epidemic of arm-shattering. Among the sea urchins a kind with very slender, long, almost needle-like spines is abundant. These spines are not only sharp, but stinging, and often a warning tingle told the exploring hand in crevice or pool bottom of the presence of this well-protected little urchin. Another slender-spined sort has white bands around each spine, so that the thickly beset body is black-and-white barred. A larger kind has its heavy spines each encircled by two or three rings at small distances apart. Still a larger species shows heavy, thick, blunt spines much like miniature baseball bats.

We were not the only sea-urchin collectors on the reef. With each low tide would come forth a score or more of natives, mostly half-clad women and children, who would wade about in the shallow water of the reef and among the scattered pools collecting choice tit-bits for an evening feast. Among these morsels a certain sea-urchin seemed to be favorite. Often the collectors could not restrain their appetites and would crack open the brittle tests, and suck out and swallow raw some choice inner part.

The sea-cucumbers were very abundant; they lay scattered over the whole reef top, in some places one to every square foot. A large greenish-black form about ten inches long, with four-sided body, and unusually firm body wall with short blunt tubercles; a soft-skinned dark-brown form about six inches long when not extended, but capable of great extension, found between tide lines under stones; and a small spotted brown and white kind three to four inches long, were the three most abundant species; but several other kinds were common, among them a small black knobby sort, the real beche de mer of the Samoans.