1. THE THICK-ARMED ANEMONE.2. THE SNAKE-LOCKED ANEMONE.
When the snake-locked anemone closes up, however, you would never know it for the same creature, for it not only draws its long tentacles back into its body and tucks them away out of sight, but contracts the body itself until it is almost flat. Unless you looked very carefully at the rock to which it was clinging you would never notice it at all.
This anemone is not a very common one, and is chiefly found on the rocky coasts of Devonshire and Cornwall. In colour it is almost white.
CHAPTER X
MADREPORES, CORALS, AND SPONGES
PLATE XLIII
MADREPORES (1)
IN some ways these curious creatures are very much like sea anemones, and if you were to find one with its tentacles spread you would be almost sure to think that it was a small anemone. But if you touched it you would find that you had made a mistake, for instead of closing itself up into an almost shapeless lump of jelly, as the anemones do, it would just draw back its tentacles, and leave a kind of flinty skeleton still standing up. For madrepores are really much more like the wonderful little creatures which make coral. They suck lime, in some strange manner which nobody quite understands, out of the sea-water, and build it up round and underneath their own bodies. And if you startle them in any way they draw themselves down inside this shelly covering, and disappear from sight altogether; so that all that you can see is a number of thin plates standing upright on their edges, and looking rather like the lower surface of a mushroom turned into stone.
Madrepores feed on very tiny animals, such as the fry of small fishes, and the zoeas of shrimps and prawns. And they catch their victims by means of a number of fleshy tentacles, which are very much like those of the sea anemones, except that they always have little round knobs at the tips. These tentacles are set with numbers of tiny cells containing slender poisoned darts, just as those of the anemones are.
If you want to find madrepores, you must look for them among the rocks near the water’s edge when the tide is at its lowest. But they are not very common, and on many parts of the coast they are never found at all.