Fortunately, on land at least, they are sluggish and non-aggressive. They hardly can be induced to bite and will suffer almost any indignity without retaliating. About the only way a person would be likely to be bitten would be by stepping directly on the head of one of these snakes with bare feet. This is an unlikely event, for the sea snakes do not spend any time under shallow water where they would be a peril for bathers.
Some are quite beautiful, about five feet long and banded with black and white. Their capture is easy. It is simply a matter of pinning down the head with a stick and picking up the snake by the neck.
Throughout the entire sea snake area in the Pacific there are only five or six instances reported where the serpents have bitten humans. In every case the victim has died; there is no anti-venom against the sea snake toxin.
Some years ago Dr. Herbert Clark, former director of the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory, dove off a boat in Balboa harbor and swam ashore, a distance of about 200 yards. As he neared the shore there were alarmed cries from the deck he had left. Dr. Clark looked around. He found he had unwittingly swum through a school of several thousand black and white serpents, each about two feet long. None had touched him.
Weird Plant-Animals
Near the bottom of life’s pyramid there is a weird race of plant-animals. They are among the closest of all many-celled living things to the primaeval protoplasm from which all life arose.
They are the slime molds found on decaying logs and tree stumps in damp woods or on piles of rain-soaked dead leaves in shady gardens. The nightmarish mycetozoa—botanists call them myxomycetes—are timeless survivals out of living creation’s dank, warm cradle. Some of the weirdest imaginings of malevolent life on other planets picture it in the form of gigantic slime mold aggregations—undifferentiated masses of naked protoplasm endowed with a malign intelligence which has evolved without the intermediaries of nervous systems or brains.
These organisms can be considered one of nature’s probing experiments towards higher forms of life. The experiment was a failure, but unlike most of nature’s discards these organisms have survived. Even now they may be engaged in a process of evolution all their own.
Biologists are not entirely agreed in which kingdom to place the organisms, although they usually are classified with the plants. They start life as spores, like the dust of molds or toadstools whose single-celled particles serve the same reproductive function as seeds in higher plants. From each spore arises from one to four animal-like organisms, hardly distinguishable from the one-celled protozoan animal, the amoeba. Each swims about freely for a time by means of tentacle-like arms, the flagellae.
These free-moving living particles are known as “swarm cells”. Each is an individual with a film-like skin separating it from all other individuals. That is, the protoplasm of each cell is enclosed within a boundary and in the center of each is a nucleus. These one-celled “animals” wander about freely for a few days. During this time they may mate, as individuals. More commonly each loses its flagellae and splits into several fragments. Each of these fragments becomes a complete organism. These mate, with complete fusion of their bodies. The result is a double plant or animal—depending on whether it is observed by a botanist or zoologist—known as a zygote. The fragments are extremely voracious little creatures devouring greedily the one-celled plants, or bacteria, which they encounter.