Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/313

Rh of the sea life of our littoral waters, but also of the delicately balanced and interlocking associations of the animals and plants composing it, the American Museum of Natural History in New York has been installing a series of groups representing the actual conditions under which this life occurs at certain definite localities on the Atlantic coast. Photographic and painted transparencies are arranged to show the surroundings at the locality in question while the animals and seaweeds are represented partly by actual specimens and partly by models colored from life. The latest of these groups, as shown in the accompanying photographs, reproduces the animal and plant colonies to be found living below the low-water mark on the wharf piles in the neighborhood of Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. The upper part of the group represents an old abandoned wharf between the piles of which may be seen

 The pile to the left is covered with the tubes of serpulid worms, overhung by the yellowish masses of the ascidian, Molgula. Starfishes, mollusks. barnacles, sponges, sea-anemones and sis species of ascidians are seen on the central pile.