The experiments were carried out with pollen of flowers and root tips of beans where results are relatively easy to determine.
Snails Are the Flowers of the Sea
There are more than 80,000 kinds of snails in the world. They swim, jump, crawl, burrow, live at the bottom of the sea and in the tops of trees. They range in size from the horse conch of Florida, two feet long, to animals hardly the size of a grain of sugar. About half of all species live in the seas.
Most are bottom dwellers, unable to swim, but several spend their lives on the surface. One, the purple janthina, floats upside down on a raft of air bubbles trapped in a special kind of mucous which it secretes. Others live permanently attached to sea weeds. Most abundant of the sea snails probably are the pterepods, or sea butterflies, which live several feet below the surface in daylight but come to the top in countless hordes at night. In some places the sea bottom is littered many feet deep with their shells, of which there is almost constant rain as the animals die.
Loveliest flowers of the sea are the nudibranchs. Seldom has nature produced in either plants or animals such elaborate combinations of brilliant colors and decorative appendages as in the bodies of these shell-less ocean snails. Although there are more than 2,000 species, they are among the least known of all sea creatures. One reason for this is that most of them are quite small, ranging from a fourth to half an inch in length. Their coloring hardly can be appreciated except under some magnification.
Nowhere are they very abundant. Their habitats vary from close inshore to deep water, but they are most likely to be seen in pools left among shore rocks by receding tides. Their extremely elaborate color patterns may be protective, to some extent. It is known that certain species have the ability to change colors in response to changes in their environment. They become bright red, for example, when living in association with a red sponge. Even more decorative than the color patterns are the appendages, extensions of the skin and sometimes of the digestive tract, which take the forms of delicately modelled, almost microscopic plants.
All these nudibranchs are flesh-eating creatures feeding chiefly on sea anemones found on the sea bottom. Most of the anemones are equipped with thousands of so-called nematocysts or stinging organs. These are microscopic, ball-shaped structures filled with a virulent poison. The same mechanism is best known in sea nettles. As soon as a nematocyst is exposed to any tension it explodes, releasing this poison.
The little sea snails have evolved the ability to swallow the poison balls without exploding them. They pass into the digestive tract, but are not digested. In some way the nematocysts find their way through certain of the appendages growing out of the digestive organs to the outside of the body. There they are retained, and serve the sea snail in the same way they served the sea anemone. The little creature becomes quite dangerous to any of its natural enemies.
Among the most enthusiastic nudibranch collectors is the Emperor of Japan, who has discovered and described several new species. Some of his publications about them have been illustrated by leading Japanese artists and show the unearthly beauty of the creatures to the best advantage.