A Year at the Shore

by Philip Henry Gosse

Let me anticipate here to narrate the after history of my captive. Consigned to a shallow tank at home, after a few days I missed him one morning, and on searching the whole room carefully, found him at length under the edge of the hearth-rug, some yards from the tank, with all his rays broken into many pieces, and only the short stumps remaining. Though dry and apparently dead, I perceived a slight movement in the stumps, which gave me hope of revival, and I replaced the poor maimed thing, sadly shorn of his glory, in the tank. He did revive; and the truncated ends of the ray-stumps enabled me to see the arrangement of the spines. These form about nine rows on each side, radiating fan-like; within the undermost row on each side is a row of flexible bladdery tubes much like the suckers, and like them protruding from orifices in the calcareous skeleton, but not retractile. They are studded with tiny warts, and terminate not in a sucking disk, but in a sort of bifid extremity. They are not used for locomotion, nor are they ordinarily applied to the ground as if tactile, and yet are continually thrown round so that the tip is brought up to the base, and this suddenly and abruptly, and every few seconds, as if something were captured and conveyed to the mouth; but this cannot be, for the mouth is not there, and nothing is seen to be seized. Perhaps some intelligence, in a way unimaginable by us, is thus obtained, of outward things.

The poor maimed creature managed to stump awkwardly about for a few days, but soon died, with no perceptible attempt to renew the self-amputated members.

The Brittle-stars appear to move by means of the flexibility of their long snake-like rays, the spines with which they are furnished enabling these organs to obtain a hold on the surface along which they crawl; and that so secure that even perpendicular and very smooth surfaces present no hindrance to their progression. They have no proper suckers; and the rays are not constituent portions of the body, containing part of the stomach and intestine as in the true Star-fishes, but imperforate appendages to it.

ANGLED CRAB.

Crouching among the rubbish, with all its long limbs snugly packed together, as if hoping to find safety in being overlooked, we see a strange form of crustacea, the Angled Crab.[115] Vain hope! How can a creature of that bizarre form, and of those conspicuous colours, be concealed from notice by merely lying still? Gently touch him behind, and what an enormous length of limb is suddenly thrown out! If, according to the proverb, “kings have long arms,” surely this must be the very monarch of the crabs; and most curiously are they folded when at rest, the fore-arm lying close, throughout its length, upon the upper arm, the elbow projecting far on each side. The carapace is sometimes described as rhomboidal, but this does not give us a correct idea of its form; its outline is rather that of an isosceles triangle, of which the apical half is cut off; the base of this truncate triangle, which is the front side of the shell, runs off into two sharp spines at the angles, and has also a broad projection in the middle, on each side of which are seated the long footstalks of the eyes, and which carries on its front the two pairs of antennæ. The thighs of the true legs are thin and blade-like, so that these limbs all pack one over the other very compactly.

Plate 26.
P. H. GOSSE, del. LEIGHTON, BROS.
NUT-CRAB. ANGLED-CRAB.

The general colour is a light salmon-red, often with the hinder half of the carapace, and the inner sides of the limbs, of a pale buff. The eyes (not the stalks) and the movable finger of each hand, which is slender and elegantly curved, are polished black.

Not uncommon with us, it is not very often seen even by the naturalist, as it seems to be properly an inhabitant of deep water. Occasionally it is washed ashore on the beach by a heavy sea; but this is accidental. Montagu first ascertained it to be British by finding it at Kingsbridge, near Plymouth. Mr. Couch finds it common on the Cornwall coast, together with an allied, but certainly distinct, species, the G. rhomboides of the Mediterranean, to be identified by its lacking a second spine behind each angular one, which is well marked in our species. Though essentially a southern form, it occurs on the Dublin coast, and that in sufficient number to have obtained a popular appellation,—that of “Coffin-crab;” the term “coffin” being possibly a word of the Irish tongue, meaning something very different from that which it suggests to our ears.