“These iguanas are vegetable feeders,” Dr. Bartsch recorded in his field notes. “They are fairly tame and persisted in chasing the nooses on the ends of our sticks, instead of running their heads through them or letting us place them around their necks. When hard-pressed they finally dash into holes that look like huge crab burrows. When near the coast, where there is a hurricane rampart, they seek refuge in crevices of the rocks. We were surprised when we took those we had captured from our bag on board ship to find four of them dead. Evidently they have a way of ending their own lives.”
On Petite Gonave Island off the coast of Haiti are large iguanas which—native fishermen say—can be captured safely only by getting them drunk. Travellers are warned that they are extremely dangerous animals when sober. The fishermen pour rum into hollows of rocks along the shore. The big lizards appear to be very fond of this beverage and drink themselves helpless.
Forests That Eat Meat
Relic groves of the great meat-eating forests of 150,000,000 years ago still thrive on the floors of deep, warm seas.
These are made up of plant-animals—predacious trees with red blood and hearts—the crinoids. There are about 700 extant, compared to more than a thousand extinct, species. For a hundred million years they were among the ocean’s dominant life forms. Fossil crinoids, or “stone lilies,” make up great marble beds in both American and Europe. In 1934 the Smithsonian Johnson expedition dredged nineteen species, including two not hitherto known to science, from the bottom of the great Porto Rico Deep.
The crinoids are highly developed animals, although they look like plants. They can by no means be considered as a form of life on the dividing line of the animal and vegetable worlds. Rather they are animals which have taken on the superficial appearance of plants. They are very highly specialized animals—so much so that there are few places in the world where they can survive in great numbers.
In life they usually are brilliantly colored. Judging from those that are found on the sea bottoms today one of the ancient meat-eating forests must have presented a very colorful spectacle of red, green, purple and yellow “blossoms.”
Most of them live in deep water. There are free-moving varieties as well as those that are fixed to the bottom with stems like plants. Until recent years few were recovered in good condition because of the tendency of one of these plant-animals to break itself to pieces when agitated. When brought up from the bottom to the deck of a ship the crinoid would proceed to break off the featherlike arms which make up the blossoms. This was its natural defense reaction in the depths. Its way of escape when one of its arms was seized by a fish was to break it off. Then it could grow another quite easily. As a matter of fact, this is the way the crinoid grows—one of the most wasteful processes of growth in nature. It breaks off one arm and grows two instead; but it cannot increase the number of its arms without discarding an old one.
Another difficulty is that the gorgeous colors of the meat-eating flowers are fast only in salt water. They fade rapidly in air, fresh water or alcohol so that there can be only a fleeting impression of the true coloration.
These crinoids live, for the most part, on diatoms, small crustaceans, and other tiny sea creatures which they first paralyze with poison from the tentacles which line the grooves of the arms through which food is carried to the mouth.