Page:VCH Sussex 1.djvu/303

 CRUSTACEANS added that Bognor is more dependent on its prawn fishery than on either lobsters or crabs, and that the Httle lobsters are taken with the prawns in the prawn pots.'' Mr. Guermonprez in 1902 reports the lobster at Bognor as still abundant. Whether in this same tribe the family Potamo- biidffi is represented in Sussex by the widely distributed Potamobius pallipes, the river crayfish, I have not been able to ascertain. It is at least highly probable that the species will be found in some of the streams. Of prawns the incidental mention has already been frequent, and one could wish that the subject were as simple as the name is familiar. But the words prawn and shrimp, being unscientific terms, have often been applied interchangeably and without method, those who use them being guided by differences of size and colour rather than by the structural features and relationships of the animals. Most of them fall to some one of the many families of the tribe Caridea. In the family Palamonidas is included our best known English prawn, Leander serratus (Pennant), of which Bell says, 'I found that at Bognor the fishermen consider them, when young, as a distinct species, and assert that, at certain seasons, they drive the true prawns from their ordinary place of resort. The probability is that at the season when the young ones have arrived at a certain age, they separate themselves from the older ones, which at that period of the year retire further from the shore.' ^ There are indeed few households of living creatures in which nature does not exercise a centrifugal force of one kind or another, so as to check un- wholesome concentration. Leander squilla (Linn.), a species very similar to L. serratus, but smaller, is recorded by White from ' Sussex (Little Hampton).'^ In the market place this species shares with some others the colloquial names of white shrimps and cup shrimps. Palcemonetes varians (Leach), which I have myself taken at Lancing, and which is recorded by the Natural History of Hastings as common,* has the peculiarity of making itself at home in fresh and brackish waters, whereas the other two species are strictly marine. In all three it is only the first two pairs of legs that are furnished with pincers, and it is the second pair that is the longer, a different arrangement from that in the lobster, which has an enormous first pair of chelipeds, followed by two pairs that are minutely chelate. In the family Processidse the second pair of legs, though longer than the first, are not so strong, and are tipped with tiny nippers. Processa canaliculata. Leach, has a front pair of legs that are not properly a pair, since only one of them is chelate, the other being simple, that is devoid of a chela. Adam White records this species in the British Museum collection from ' Bognor. Presented by Prof Bell.' * We may assume that this is a boiled example, since Bell, speak- ing of specimens, says, ' That from which my figure and the above description are given was accidentally found by myself in a dish of boiled prawns, on which I was about to breakfast, at Bognor, in the year 1 Report on the Crab and Lobster Fisheries of England and Wales, p. xii. 2 British Stalk-eyed Crustacea, p. 303. ^ List of British Animals in British Museum, p. 42. ^ p. 4.0. s List of British Animals, p. 39. I 257 33