Elementary Zoology, Second EditionKellogg, Vernon L. (Vernon Lyman)
Science
Elementary Zoology, Second Edition
Kellogg, Vernon L. (Vernon Lyman)
Animals; Zoology
Yet the Siphonophore is more truly to be
regarded as a community in which the hundreds or thousands of animals,
representing five or six kinds of individuals, all of one species, are
fastened together. Each individual performs the particular duties
devolving upon its kind or class. Thus there are food-gathering
individuals, locomotor individuals, sense individuals, and
reproductive individuals. The modifications of the various kinds of
individuals are more extreme than in the case of the various kinds of
individuals composing a bee-community, for example, but the holding
together or fusing of all into one body or corporation is a condition
which makes this greater modification necessary and not unexpected.
And there is no difficulty in seeing that each of these parts is
really, structurally considered, a modified polyp or medusa.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.--A jellyfish or medusa, _Gonionema vertens_,
eating two small fishes. (From specimen from Atlantic Coast.)]
=The large jellyfishes, etc. (Scyphozoa).=--To the class Scyphozoa
belong most of the common large jellyfishes. When one walks along the
sea-beach soon after a storm one may find many shapeless masses of a
clear jelly-like substance scattered here and there on the sand. These
are the bodies or parts of bodies of jellyfishes which have been cast up
by the waves. Exposed to the sun and wind the jelly-like mass soon dries
or evaporates away to a small shrivelled mass. The body-substance of a
jellyfish contains a very large proportion of water; in fact there is
hardly more than 1 per cent of solid matter in it.
The jellyfishes occur in great numbers on the surface of the ocean and
are familiar to sailors under the name of "sea-bulbs." Some live in
the deeper waters; a few specimens have been dredged up from depths of
a mile below the surface. They range in size from "umbrellas" or disks
a few millimeters in diameter to disks of a diameter of two meters
(2-1/6 yards). They are all carnivorous, preying on other small ocean
animals which they catch by means of their tentacles provided with
stinging-threads. The tentacles of some of the largest jellyfishes
"reach the astonishing length of 40 meters, or about 130 feet." Many
of the jellyfishes are beautifully colored, although all are nearly
transparent. Almost all of them are phosphorescent, and when irritated
some emit a very strong light.
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