When the angler is hungry, it hunts out a convenient place in shallow waters, where its color and markings make the fish indistinguishable from the sea-bottom. Here it lies quietly, often as if dead, while its floating filaments, kept in motion by the tide, decoy other fish, which never discover their mistake until too late to escape from the angler’s merciless jaws.
A bulletin by Theodore Gill, “Angler Fishes, Their Kinds and Ways,” recently published by the Smithsonian Institution, and from which these notes are obtained, says that the most extraordinary of all the anglers are those that carry lanterns to see with.
“Some stout-bodied anglers resorted to deep and deeper waters, where the light from the sun was faint or even ceased, and a wonderful provision was at last developed by kindly nature, which replaced the sun’s rays by some reflected from the fish itself. In fact, the illicium (a prolongation of the spine) has developed into a rod with a bulb having a phosphorescent terminal portion, and the “bait” round it has been also modified and variously added to; the fish has also had superadded to its fishing apparatus a lantern and worm-like lures galore.
“How efficient such an apparatus must be in the dark depths where these angler fishes dwell may be judged from the fact that special laws have been enacted in some countries against the use of torches and other lights for night fishing because of their deadly attractiveness. Not only the curiosity of the little deep-sea fishes, but their appetite is appealed to by the worm-like objects close to or in relief against the phosphorescent bulb of the anglers.”
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DEVICES, FATAL
It is easy to go into evil by the trapdoor of temptation; it is not so easy to retrace the steps.
The bladderwort is a water-plant and catches much of its food. Underneath the surface of the water in which the plant floats are a number of lax, leafy branches spread out in all directions, and attached to these are large numbers of little flattened sacks or bladders, sometimes one-sixth of an inch long. The small end of each little bladder is surrounded by a cluster of bristles, forming a sort of hollow funnel leading into the mouth below, and this is covered inside by a perfect little trapdoor, which fits closely, but opens with the least pressure from without. A little worm or insect, or even a very small fish, can pass within, but never back again. The sack acts like an eel-trap or a catch-’em-alive mouse-trap. These little sacks actually allure very small animals by displaying glandular hairs about the entrance. The small animals are imprisoned and soon perish and decay to nourish the wicked plant. (Text.)—Prof. W. J. Beal, The Popular Science Monthly.
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Devil, A Prayer to the—See [Children’s Religious Ideas].