The winners in life's race

by Arabella B. Buckley

Unnumber’d shoals glide thro’ the cold abyss

Unseen, and wanton in unenvied bliss.”

We shall be groping more and more in darkness as we go, for the sunlight scarcely reaches beyond 1000 feet, and we have left its last rays behind us, and the water is growing icy cold. How strange, then, that the first fish we meet should have large wide-open eyes! This is the Beryx,[25] shaped something like a perch, but about a foot and a half long, and genealogists ought to look at him with respect, for his ancestors (see [heading of Chapter]) are almost the oldest known bony fish, and lived in the chalk seas.

Has he come down here because the upper world was too rough for him? If so, he has found comparative stillness, for he is far beneath the turmoil of the waves, and only the slowly creeping currents make any movement around him. But he has not escaped from the struggle for life, for not only is a good-sized shark coming his way, but a huge monster of the bony race, six feet long,[25] with wide-opened jaw, sharp pointed teeth, and large keen eyes, is wandering near in search of prey, devouring large and small fish with great impartiality.

Still in the dense darkness the Beryx must surely escape? No! for, strangely enough, lights are travelling about in this midnight region. The monster himself carries lamps upon his body, and a shoal of small oblong fish, something of the size and shape of a gudgeon, come swimming by, carrying on their sides whole rows of shining spots giving out phosphorescent light; while not far off another fish, called in India the Bombay duck, glows all over, as if his whole body had been rubbed in phosphorus. Nay! so far as we know the Beryx himself is probably gleaming with light, for his body is covered with a large quantity of the same slimy fluid which makes the “Bombay duck” phosphorescent when he is freshly drawn out of the sea.

So these curious fish, living in eternal darkness except when they make an expedition to the surface, carry many of them their own lights; and as we go deeper still more and more of them are found with shining mother-of-pearl-like spots on their head, or sides, or tail, so that the very darkness is alive with light. What slaughter and hunting there is among them! for they all eat each other, and even their own young, there being no plants for any of them to feed on. There are the deep-sea cod-fish; strange forms with large heads, long tapering tails, and thread-like fins, chasing the smaller fish, and falling victims themselves to the fierce Stomias which comes sailing along with its row of glowing lights, and its huge sharp teeth, ready to seize its prey. Both these fish go down as deep as ten thousand feet and more, accompanied by another fish quite as ferocious, though only a foot long, with large teeth sticking out of its mouth like the tusks of a boar, and curious round spots, with lenses in them, on its side, which may be eyes, or may be lanterns to light it on its road; and among these luminous fishes are wriggling along the deep-sea Conger eels, with toothless mouths and elastic stomachs, swallowing large fish whole; while another curious cod-like fish, whose stomach can stretch to more than four times its natural size, draws itself over its prey just as a snake does, and carries it in the hanging bag till it is digested. And deeper yet in the dead calm water roam many fishes with delicate feelers hanging from their mouths, while their fins are slender and tapering, so that they feel their way along the still depths. Among these are the Ribbon-fish, twenty feet long but only a foot deep, and never more than two inches thick in any part, with their long rosy fins floating like ribbons back from their heads and from under the body.[26]

Strange monsters are all these deep-sea fish, some of them living as much as 16,000 feet under the surface of the sea, so that if Switzerland were turned upside down in mid-ocean, the peak of Mont Blanc would not reach down to where they swim. Yet they are only modified forms of ordinary fish from the world above, which have become fitted to live under that vast pressure of water. Their skeletons, though bony and well-knit together at that depth, are fibrous and slight compared to those of their surface relations, for although they have to resist a weight of from two to sixteen tons pressing all round them, a ton weight being added for every thousand feet, no special strength is required, because the dense water permeates their whole structure, and the pressures are everywhere equal. It is the same with them as with the most delicate and fragile insects living in our atmosphere, the pressure of which would tear them to pieces if unbalanced by equal pressures within and without.

But when these deep-sea fishes are brought up quickly to the surface, the outside pressure no longer balances that inside, and so their tissues loosen and their whole framework starts apart, so that they almost fall to pieces at a touch; and their air-bladder, if they have one, expands so much as to force the stomach out of the mouth, turning them almost inside out. Neither are their lanterns a special creation for their use, but merely adaptations of that slimy fluid which we saw oozing from the scales of the minnow. In some of the deep-sea fish even the outer bones are filled with this fluid, and the line of scales along the side has large openings, so that the body is bathed in glowing slime. In others it collects in glands on the sides, making the phosphorescent spots.

In this way the deep-sea fish have become fitted to make a home in the very heart of the ocean. Some with large eyes, seeing by means of their own and their neighbours’ light, others with small eyes and delicate feelers, testing each step as they go, and feeding, probably, on the shower of minute sea-animals that falls continually from above; while some, like the Beryx, the Bombay Duck, and the light-carrying Scopelus, which live nearer the top, come up on still nights to feed at the surface of the sea.

Fig. 9.