Animal Parasites and MessmatesBeneden, P. J. van (Pierre Joseph)
Science
Animal Parasites and Messmates
Beneden, P. J. van (Pierre Joseph)
Parasites
But if naturalists are agreed as to the bond which unites these fishes
to the holothuriæ, they do not agree as to the organs which they
inhabit in their living hotel. Do they lodge in the digestive cavity
of the holothuriæ, or do they inhabit the arborescent respiratory
processes which open at the posterior extremity of the body? Until
recently it was thought that it was in their stomach, but a doubt has
arisen. Professor Semper, who has studied these animals with
particular care at the Philippine Islands, had the curiosity to open
the stomach of some of them, and found there, not the animals taken by 6
the holothuriæ, but the remains of its respiratory processess which
they were in the act of digesting. Is it then merely a messmate? We
must have more information on this point; and if it were not
accidentally that the fierasfer swallowed the walls of the compartment
in which he was lodged, he ought rather to take his place among
parasites. Though it lodges in the respiratory processes, as the
learned professor at Wurtzburg asserts, the fierasfer may also be a
messmate after the fashion of so many others which inhabit the
neighbourhood of the rectum, in order the more conveniently to snap up
those animals which are attracted by the odour.
The fierasfers are not the only fishes which seek assistance from the
holothuriæ; a species lives at Zamboanga, to which the specific name
of Scabra has been given, and in the stomach of which, says Mons.
Johannes Müller, usually lives a myxinoid fish, called _Enchelyophis
vermicularis_. Unfortunately, we are not told in what part of the
stomach it resides; for all is stomach in these animals.
It is less degrading for a fish to ask assistance from one in his own
rank. The Mediterranean offers a curious instance of this. Risso saw
at Nice, at the commencement of this century, the monstrous fish known
under the name of _Beaudroie_ (the angler, or fishing-frog)
lodging in its enormous branchial sac a fish of the family of the
Murenidæ, the _Apterychtus ocellatus_. He is found there
evidently under the condition of a messmate. Although the eels
generally get their living easily, the Angler possesses fishing
implements which are wanting in them, and when both of them are 7
immersed in the ooze, it carries on a fishery sufficiently abundant to
enable it to share the spoil with others. This same angler lives in
the northern seas, and there it harbours an amphipod crustacean, which
until lately has escaped the vigilance of carcinologists. We shall
speak of it further on.
Dr. Collingwood saw a sea anemone in the Chinese Sea, which was not
less than two feet in diameter, and in the interior of which lodges a
very frisky little fish, the name of which he could not tell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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