"The lady crabs were plentiful, always alert, and inclined to be pugnacious at our intrusion. The first one I met instantly rose upright at the surface of the water, and when I made an advance it sprang half way out of the water and cracked its pincer claws together as if supposing it would reach, or at any rate frighten me. Perhaps it was my shadow it clutched at so viciously. If so, the crab probably concluded its huge antagonist to be an intangible ghost upon which the most powerful claws could have no effect, for an instant later it backed down—literally and swiftly—to the bottom, and in a twinkling had wriggled tailwise into the mud and out of sight. When with my shovel I routed madame out of that retreat, she indignantly scuttled off too briskly to be followed, and will have great tales to tell of her adventure.
"The stone and fiddler crabs were as common and comical as usual; and I made the acquaintance of a new one called Gebia, which was a small, semi-transparent, bluish white, washed-out, bloodless specimen, shaped somewhat like a crawfish and carrying bunches of roe beneath its abdomen. It looked like a miniature lobster made of glass and filled with milk. Then in the eelgrass there was a funny isopod, called Caprella. It was half an inch or so long, and clung by its hinder feet to the grass, waving its body up and down in search of minute prey. Other isopods and amphipods were exposed by turning over stones or digging in the sand at the edge of the water—small, pale, shapeless crustacea, which are flattened laterally so that they must lie on their sides, and when uncovered will kick about with feet and tail in laughable anxiety to get under something. Under the stones we found the tubes made by a certain species; and when we captured the active little architect and put him in a bucket of clean water, he instantly began to gather grains of sand and stone and to join them together Into a shield under which he might hide. We found that these grains were joined together by spiderlike threads, which the amphipod spins from two pairs of small legs under the middle of his body, secreting a fluid that hardens in the water. Another (Hippa) about the size and shape of a robin's egg, but with a thin shell of mother-of-pearl (so to speak), gave us great amusement by its extraordinary celerity in burrowing, so that we could hardly seize it before it had squirmed down out of reach into the wet sand."
The edible crabs (Cancer) live in the shallow region just below ebb tide, for they cannot endure exposure to air as well as other species, and live by scavenging. The lobsters are inhabitants of still deeper water, especially where it is somewhat rocky, and devour more carrion than living fish. That miniature of the lobster, the fresh-water crawfish, which is also edible, dwells in deep burrows in wet lands—burrows that are really wells half filled with water. Various species of these and other edible forms of Crustacea are found all over the world.
MILLIPEDES AND CENTIPEDES
The myriapods (class Myriapoda) are those unpleasant creatures more commonly known as centipedes, millipedes, or thousand-legged worms. They have a wormlike form, with the body divided into segments, a distinct head with antennæ, jaws and several single eyes, and a varying number of air tubes, or tracheæ; two sexes exist, and eggs are laid in the ground within cases formed by the mother of pellets of mud. They vary in size from an almost invisible minuteness to a length in some tropical species of six or more inches. The centipedes (Chilopoda) are those flattened forms so often seen in and about rotting wood and vegetation or in moist ground, their bodies looking like a chain of plates joined together by flexible skin, each section having a single pair of legs, usually very short, but in one sort (Cermatia) each leg is longer than the body, and the hinder pair twice as long, matched by two very long feelers. Most of them are predacious, feeding on anything they can catch, and their strong jaws exude poison. The larger ones may inflict a very painful bite if incautiously handled.
| GIANT CENTIPEDE |
| (Scolopendra gigas) |
Another group, the Diploda, are known as galley worms, or millipedes, and have two pairs of bristlelike legs on each segment. Here the body is as round as that of an earthworm, and is incased in a hard, chitinous shell, usually red-brown in color; and when disturbed they coil up and emit an acrid, unpleasant odor as a defense.
WEAVERS OF SILKEN TRAPS
The class Arachnida, which contains the scorpions, spiders, mites and their allies, connects the Crustacea with the Insects; and some naturalists include within it the eurypterids and king crabs, classified in this book with the Crustacea. All live on land and breathe air except a small group of allies (Pycnogonida) which are marine, and may be found on the rocks, and clinging to wharf piles, etc., on our coasts as well as elsewhere; they appear to be all legs, and are known to New England fishermen as "no-body crabs." The class includes seven orders, the lowest in rank of which is that of the scorpions (Scorpionida).