Diversions of a NaturalistLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
Diversions of a Naturalist
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Natural history
Usually accompanying the floating crowd of the common and abundant
Aurelia are a few specimens of a very unpleasant kind of Medusa of a
turbid appearance, often called "slime balls" by fishermen, from six
inches to a foot in diameter. It is known to naturalists by the name
"Cyanæa capillata." The tentacles on the edge of the disk of this kind
of jelly-fish are very long and elastic, stretching to several feet,
even yards, in length, and are provided with very powerful stinging
hairs. The tentacles not infrequently become coiled around the body of
a bather; the stinging hairs are shot out of the little sacs in which
they are rolled up, and the result may be very painful to the person
stung in this way and even dangerous. There are two other common large
jelly-fish on the English coast, one called "Chrysaora" (Fig. 8), with
a wheel-like pattern of brown pigment on the disk, and the other with
the mouth lobes very large and bound together like a column.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--A common British Jelly-fish.
Chrysaora hysoscella, usually twice as big as the figure.]
The common Aurelia is remarkable for the fact that the young which
hatch from its eggs attach themselves to stones and rocks on the sea
bottom, and grow into little white tube-like polyps, about half an
inch long, quite unlike their parent, with a crown of small tentacles
surrounding the mouth, whilst they are fixed by the opposite end of
the body. Then a very curious thing happens. The little polyp becomes
nipped at intervals across its length, so that it looks like a pile
of saucers--a dozen or more. And then the top saucer swims away as a
minute jelly-fish, the next follows, and so on, so that, in the course
of an hour or two, the whole pile separates into a number of freely
swimming young, each of which gradually grows into a full-sized
Aurelia. I have only once had the chance of witnessing this beautiful
sight, and that was many years ago in a tank at the Zoological Gardens
(they have no such tanks now), where the polyp-like young (called
"Hydra tuba") spontaneously put in an appearance, and proceeded to
break up into piles of little disks, which separated and swam off as
one watched them. The French poet, Catulle Mendés, imagined a world
where the flowers flew about freely and the butterflies were fixed to
stalks. His fancy is to some degree realized by the swimming away of
the young jelly-fish from their stalks. There are a host of very minute
jelly-fish, measuring when full grown only half an inch or less in
diameter. They originate as buds from small branching polyps, one kind
of which is common on oyster-shells, and is called "the herring-bone
coralline." The dried skins of these coralline polyps (which are horny)
are often to be picked up with masses of seaweed on the seashore after
a storm. The little jelly-fish are the ripe individuals of the polyps,
and produce eggs and sperm which grow to be polyp-trees. These, again,
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