Our Arctic province : $b Alaska and the Seal IslandsElliott, Henry Wood
History
Our Arctic province : $b Alaska and the Seal Islands
Elliott, Henry Wood
Alaska -- Description and travel
As to sea-weeds, or mosses,—the extent, luxuriance, variety, and
beauty of the algæ forests of those waters of Bering Sea which
lave the coasts of the Pribylov Islands, call for more detail of
description than space in this volume will allow, since anything like
a fair presentation of the subject would require the reproduction
of my water-colored drawings. After all heavier gales, especially
the southeasters in October, if a naturalist will take the trouble
to walk the sand-beach between Lukannon and northeast point of St.
Paul Island, he will be rewarded by the memorable sight. He will
find thrown up by the surf a vast windrow of kelp along the whole
eight or ten miles of this walk—heaped, at some spots, nearly as high
as his head; the large trunks of _Melanospermæ_, the small, but
brilliant red and crimson fronds of _Rhodospermæ_ interwoven with the
emerald-green leaves of the _Chlorospermæ_. The first-named group is
by far the most abundant, and upon its decaying, fermenting brown
and ochre heaps, he will see countless numbers of a buccinoid whelk,
and a limnaca, feeding as they bore or suck out myriads of tiny
holes in the leaf-fronds of the strong growing species. _Actinia_ or
sea-anemones, together with asteroids or starfishes, _Discophoræ_ or
jelly-fishes, are also interwoven and heaped up with the “kapoosta”
or sea-cabbages just referred to; also, many rosy “sea-squirts,”
yellow “cucumbers,” and other forms of _Holothuridæ_.
On the old killing-fields, on those spots where the sloughing
carcasses of repeated seasons have so enriched the soil as to render
it like fire to most vegetation, a silken green _Confervæ_ grows
luxuriantly. This terrestrial algoid covering appears here and there,
on these grounds, like so many door-mats of pea-green wool. That
confervoid flourishes only on those spots where nothing but pure
decaying animal matter is found. An admixture of sand or earth will
always supplant it by raising up instead those strong growing grasses
which I have alluded to elsewhere, and which constitute the chief
botanical life of the killing-grounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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