THE DEVIL FISH

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2313, 4 December 1925, Page 11

THE DEVIL FISH

TAI/ES OF MIGHTY MONSTERS,

THE MUCH-DREADED KRAKBN.

No marine creatures have ever exercised the imagination and terror of mankind like the “devil fish.” Classical and mediaeval writers, such as Aristotle, Pliny, -Elian and Aldovrandus, tell fabulous tales of gigantic cuttlefish that seize men and whales, which they describe aa attaining a length of 120 feet! The mythical kraken of romance was said to possess a shapeless body a mile and a-half in circumference and to be capable of capsizing the ships if their crows were not able to cut away the encircling arms. It was supposed to have a particular desire for the blood- of men, and to hunt especially on tempestuous nights, entwining the masts and rigging with its great tentacles, each covered with hundreds of suckors, and endeavouring to drag the ship below the sea, says a writer in “T.P.’s and Cassell’s 'Weekly.” Even after the arms had been severed It was by no means certain that they would not grow again like the heads of hydra. Hooking the Frey.

Tho cuttle-fish are of two kinds—true octopus which has eight tentacles, and the squids or calamarics which are furnished with 10. In both the arms boar rows of muscular suckers and, in some cases, hooks that are used solely for holding the prey, which is bitten in pieces by the formidable beak, very like that of a parrot, situated at the base of the tentacles. They have a stout internal shell (the cuttlo-flsh hone of commerce) that gives support to the soft body. Bergson’s Evolution Theory. But the most highly developed organs they possess aro their eyes, which are as elaborately formed, and probably at least as efficient, as onr cwn, to which they bear a striking resemblance. Bergson, in his “Creative Evolution,” makes a great point of this similarity between the eyes of the cuttle-fish and of the vertebrates of which man is the highest example. If, he argues ,two types of animals which can have no possible relationship to one another, have developed in response to the action of light organs which are ho very much alike there must be some similar force acting in both cases—this being the creative force which he considers the motive power behind evolution. Tho Prince of Monaco, whose hobby was marine research, made especial expeditions in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in search of the toothed sperm-whaio, because of the remains of gig-antlo cuttle-fish which are to be found in the stomachs of theso beaota whose principal food they appear to be. In 1 one case a single incomplete 'tentacle was found which measures 27 feet, while the hooks on tho suckora wore often as 'largo and formidable as the claws of a lion or tiger. Apparently the monstrous cuttlefish, of which these are the remains, live neither at tho surface nor at the bottom of the sea, but in the deep w r ater which lies between and wnose inhabitants are practically unknown to science. Only the groat spermwhale is capable of attacking these monsters, and it seems to bring them to the surface of the sea before devouring them, and tho occasional spectacle of the terrific death struggle between theso, two creatures is the probable origin of many sailors’ stories.