NOTES BY THE WAYSIDE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 11798, 30 July 1900, Page 6

NOTES BY THE WAYSIDE.

By Geo. M. Thomson, F.L.S.

.there is an immensely wide field for the naturalist lying close to our own doors in the study of the living forms which inhabit our seas, and of which we really know very little as yet. If we walk round the shores of the harbour, and, picking- up some of the small weed .that grows. ;between tide-marks, shake it in a glass of sea water, we find (hat we have disturbed great numbers of little organisms, which swim, about vigorously, or sink to the bottom of the vessel and seek vainly there for .the • shelter out of which they'have been so rudely shaken. Many of "them are so small that they only reveal their singular forms under the microscope.- These shorehaunting forms of life, numerous and interesing as they are, are really, however, few as compared with those which swim in the open water, and which do not require the shelter of the plants or stones of the beach. These forms of life are called pelagic, a term derived from a Greek word meaning " the sea," because they swim in the open ocean. To collect them we must employ some kind of fine net, and tow it after "a.- boat, and this process is not as easy in execution as in design. Steamers and' most sailing i boats usually go too fast, and as the stuff j of which the tow-net is made must be of very fine mesh, such as muslin, too high a rate of speed simply tears the fabric to pieces. Besides the opportunities of going out into the open sea in sailing boats are neither numerous, nor altogether welcome, to the average landsman, so that without special arrangements it seems at first sight difficult to secure opportunities of collecting such materials. One method which was suggested and carried into practice by Professor Hcrdman, of Liverpool, is both ingenious and successful. A continual supply of sea. water i.s available *on board

steamers for washing ■ decks and other purposes, and by simply placing a muslin filter under the hose pipe when it was not in regular use. he procured a great supply .of pelagic material. Indeed, on some trip's of the Atlantic liners, the supply of. minute Crustacea was so great that * they were cooked and served up at table as a- special luxury under the name of " shrimp paste " on toast.

In Otago Harbour I have utilised the tidal current in much the same manner and found the plan fairly successful. For 20 hours out of the 24 the lightship in the lower harbour is in a strong current, due to the great ebb and flow of the tide, and oil various occasions in past years I have spent the night on board the little craft (in the days when the well-known Griff Jones was lightkeeper). and have kept the tow-net over the side for hours, filling in all spare time in examining and preserving the material collected by it. Such work is always most successful*when the air, and consequently the water, are perfectly still, cs under such circumstances the * small organisms swim right up .to the surface. If there is any break on the water they tend to sink to a depth of several feet. Hence I have aJways got the best results on clear frosty nights in winter, though boating at such, times is neither particularly warm nor exciting. Recently when out with the trawling steamer in Tasman Bay, I got very good results on two warm calm days, but unfortunately on the last of these a little breeze sprang up and my net went to pieces. On a dark still night after the net has- been over the side for an hour or more, it is drawn on board and turned inside out into a jar of clear sea water. In the process the edges and lining of the net gleam with bands and points of silvery nebulous phosphorescence, many of the smaller shining points being due to organisms so minute that they cannot be made out without the aid of a good lens. It is to be regretted that to make any complete scientific investigation of these little animals it is necessary to kill and preserve them.; for they cannot be kept alive in confinement unless one has a -well-aerated aquarium, and even then they must be taken out of the tank and be placed in a small drop of water for close examination. The colours and forms of many of them are wonderfully beautiful, but exquisite tints of the living creature, as well as their phosphorescence fade and disappear in death. It is possible for a time to preserve many of the hues in such a medium as formal, but the best general preservative is alcohol, and this destroys nearly all colours and reduces all transparent organisms to an uniform yellowish-white opacity. The number and variety of the living creatures which are thus found floating in the ocean are very great, and quite bewildering in their complexity of form. Probably the most abundant'both in kind and in individuals are small Crustacea, but, in addition, delicate little jolly fishes, a fow worms, an occasional pipe fish, and the floating eggs of several kinds of fish are taken, as well as a few vegetable organ-

isms.

Of the crustacea, the commonest forms belong to the family known as the Copepoda (or oar-footed). These are usually very minute animals from a fiftieth, to a tenth of ,in inch in length, furnished with '011S sweeping antenna in fronj;, with f'everal pairs of beautifully branched plumelike feet, on the underside of the body and ending m a forked tail, which is also often finely plumose. The eye (or closclv-ap-proxumUed pair 'of 'eyes) is "usually coloured some briyht hue most commonly red, while' in some species little bands or splashes of colour—red, blue, or yellow—set off the

Dll DE JONGH'S LIOUT BItOWN COD LIVER On,—By far the .most Efficacious Restobattvf, —Dr Whitmore, Medical Officer of lloaltli, St. Marylebone, writes:—"lf 1 woro aP k o a f or an explanation of tlio marked success which for so many years has attended the administration of Or de Jongh's Light Brcuvn Cod Liver Oil, 1 should nay that it is owinV to its extraordinary medicinal, dietetic, and regiminal propertips, and whicli nro found to exist in no other mcciioitic that .1 inn acquainted with m suah uniform combination." Hold only in capsuled Imperil! [ Half-pints, Pints, "and Ansai-, fcTnrford, and Co. (Limited), 210 Hi"h Quarts, by all chemists. Solo Consignee, Holborn, London.-—5

delicately formed little creatures. In some of the Jiauls made in Tasman Day, (he -water in the bottles into which the townet was washed became almost pink from the abundance of a little copepod with a series of bright red markings in its body. I cannot state exactly where the phosphorescent light conies from, but mankinds are brightly luminous, and this luminosity is probably of some sexual importance. These animals dart about with great rapidity, their jerky motion in the waver being due to the rapid and simultaneous sweep with which 'they move all their fringed feet. Insignificant'as they appear individually, they constitute by "their very number one of the most important forms of life which occur in the ocean, for they are the chief food of larger animals while they themselves, feed oi/microscopically small rhizopods, foraminifera, diatoms, and other animal and vegetable organisms. Another peculiar type of crustacean life taken in the surface-net is furnished by the larval forms of crabs and crayfishes. Fishermen here occasionally speak of finding or seeing the young "of * the lobsters which were liberated on the mole at the heads some years ago, but they are apparently quite ignorant of the fact that the young of all these higher Crustacea pass through many curious metamorphoses before they assnmc the adult form. Not only are these larval forms of glass-like transparency, but they, are of most fantastic shape, and are ornamented with most complicated outgrowths of spines, so that they are utterly unlike the mature animals v/iuch produced them. It will give some idea of this extraordinary unlikeness when I mention that the earlier workers'in this field of natural history constituted a, whole family—called the phyllosomidse from their leaflike appearance—with distinct, genera and species, out of the metamorphic forms of the common marine crayfishes. Among all these forms of beautifullyshaped little animals, and I have only men-

tioned two types so far, one commonly meets in tow-net gatherings with numbers of very small transparent spherical masses which look like little specks of jelly. We do not know enougb about, them yet to tell one sort from another, but these are the pelagic eggs of several kinds of fishes. It is a curious device for the dispersal of marine fishes that they should produce such myriads of small eggs, which float up to the surface of the sea and 'are thus distributed by the ocean currents. Pkunders and soles, ling, and'cod, all prgduce the same floating type of egg, and in enormous numbers. A fe"imle ling wrll liberate-10,000,000 eggs in a season, and as ling do not increase suddenly in number, it is safe to assume that on an.average 9,999,999 eggs or young are destroyed for every one which reaches maturity. -The young fish after, batching are also pelagic, and if- is only after development has proceeded to a considerable extent that they gradually sink to.the bottom of the sea and move towards shallow waters. So when the Government closed our Upper Harbour to .seine netting they did a wise thing, .-not because flounders and other flat fish spawn in. such waters, but because the young fish, after they have passed through their pelagic stage and gone down to the bottom of the^ water, and while still very small in size, find their way into shallow bays find estuaries and there grow to adult size, if not disturbed.

The transparency of most pelagic organisms, is no doubt a device to render them all but invisible to their enemies, so that individually they are likely to escape capture. But neither their invisibility nor their minute size ,are any protection against their absorption in millions by such gigantic animals as the baleen whales, which collect them in vast numbers in their hupe filterlike jaws, and, indeed, live entirely on them. No wonder then that the animals which live their whole life as free-swimmers in the ocean are po enormously abundant, or that those which pass through an- early phase of their existence in this, fnrm, reproduce in- such numbers. In order that they may. survive the tremendous death rate to which they are subject, their powers of reproduction must be very great.

Thape thoughts and ideas-do not all pass through one's mind when waiting on deck in tlie small hours of a July morning to draw up nnd examine the tow-net. At such a time the tendency is rather to ejaculate,

" Ciii bono?" 'and to wish oneself in a warm bed. But out of such nocturnal ex-

peditions much matter for future hours o:

pleasant research may be gained. Dunedin, July 26,' 1900.

SEACLIFF DRAMATIC CLUB.

On Wednesday evening last the Seacliff Amateur Dramatic Club staged Robertson's "well-known comedy, " Caste," |in the large concert hall of the asylum building.. Hitherto the company has confined itself to much less pretentious work, ■ and the result of the hard work and monotony' of much rehearsal was awaited eagerly. A very large house, despite a wet night, greeted the rising of the.curtain, which rose punctually at 8 o'clock amid thunders of applause, quite drowning the music of. the orchestra under Mr Leech. The stage at Seacliff lends itself advantageously to set scenes, and on Wednesday night the various scenes and the setting and staging of the comedy generally were in no small way responsible for the successful performance of the piece, and were in every way a. great credit to Stage-manager Barnes and his assistants. From start to finish the play ran without a single hitch, and, unlike most other amateur performances, the presence of a prompter was quite unnecessary. The short delays between the various acts were filled in by some very lively and inspiriting music from the orchestra. The' various characters in the eastwere ably filled, and though in some iv stances the conceptions of the parts were , somewhat original, these were never strained beyond what -is generally accepted as the correct reading. As the Marchioness de.St. Maur Miss Macdonald acted with all the dignity and hauteur neoessary for the position, and in the second act her acting rose to a high degree of excellence. ■ Miss Pullar as Esther Eccles gave evidence of most careful study, and her reading of the character in its various phases— wife,1, mother, widow, and daughter—was very real and life-like and graceful throughout. Polly, the ballet girl, was certainly made the most of by Miss Coughlan, who acted in a most vivacious manner, and her by-play with Gerridgo (Mi Thom*B) was responsible for great laughter. The parts D'Alroy and Hawke were filled by Messrs Barnes and Matthews respectively. The manliness of the character was very strongly brought into prominence by Mr Barnes, and his acting throughout was thoroughly consistent. Mr Matthews, as Hawke, the .rather, .aristocratic captain, looked and acted as if to the manner born. Mr Buckley's conception of the character Eccles was certainly. rather original, but at the same time there was nothing inconsistent about it, and his acting all through was worthy of great praise, while his by-play as the rather too bibulous Eccles was responsible for some really good fun, and was greeted with hearty applause. Mr Thomas, as Sam Gerridge, was also responsible, with Miss Coughlan and Mr Buckley, for some very comical situations and amusing by-play. Mr Leckie, as Dixon, filled a subordinate position with promise of better things. The success which attended this performance lends one to hope that the company may be induced to visit in the near future Waitati and Waikouaiti, when they may depend on a fine house, as their performance certainly merits it.