If you walk along the shore as the tide goes out, you may often find a soft, pink, fleshy object which has been thrown up by the waves. And if you search among the pools at low-water, you are nearly sure to see other soft, pink, fleshy objects just like it growing upon their rocky sides, or upon the stones and shells which lie at the bottom. They are often known as “dead men’s fingers,” or “dead men’s toes.” But as those are not very nice names, we will call these objects “sea fingers.”
Now if you pick up one of these sea fingers and look at it carefully, you will see that its surface is pierced all over with numbers of tiny holes. And if you take a good strong magnifying-glass, and look at one of the holes through that, you will see that it is shaped like a little flower with eight petals, or a star with eight rays.
The fact is that the sea finger is the home of a most curious animal; or perhaps one should rather say that it is the home of hundreds of most curious animals. Indeed, it is not at all easy to know which is the right way to describe it. For if you were to take a living sea finger, and to put it into a vessel of clear sea-water, you would very soon notice that a little tiny star-shaped animal had poked itself out of each little star-shaped hole. There would be hundreds of these little animals—or “polyps,” as they are called—altogether. But yet they would only have one body between them, for they are joined together in such a wonderful way that the food which is caught and eaten by one polyp nourishes all the others as well as itself!
1. THE MADREPORE.2. THE SEA FINGER.
PLATE XLIV
THE TUFT CORAL (1)
Nearly all the coral-building animals are found in the tropical seas, for they can only live in water which is quite warm all the year round. But there are just a very few which are sometimes found off our own shores, and one of these is the Tuft Coral. It looks rather like a tree which has just been “pollarded” by having all the small branches taken away and all the big ones cut quite short; and sometimes it weighs as much as six or even seven pounds.