  FLOWER-LIKE ANIMALS. The prettiest of the creatures of the shore is the Sea Anemone. No one can see it without being reminded of a flower, an Aster or Daisy, with a thick stalk and many coloured petals; but, knowing how it is made, and how it lives, we place it in the Animal Kingdom, though among the lowliest members of that Kingdom. It is a cousin of that strange creature, the Jelly-fish, which we shall look at in another lesson. SEA ANEMONE.When the tide falls, you can walk among the rocks and pools by the sea, and find Anemones in plenty. They are fixed to the rocks. Some are under the ledges, out of sight, others are low down, half buried in the wet sand; and others are on the sides of the rocks, looking like blobs of green, brown, or red jelly. Feel one of them. It is slimy, and rather firm, not so soft and yielding as the Jelly-fish. You cannot easily pull it from the rocks without harming it; but you will find other Anemones on stones and shells; and these you can put in a jar of sea-water, with some weed, and carry home to examine later on. When covered with sea-water the ugly blobs of jelly open out like beautiful flowers. In some places along our coast the floor of the sea is like a flower garden, gay with thousands of coloured Anemones. Those little "petals" are really tentacles, used for catching and holding food. We will use a shorter word and call them feelers. They are set in circles round the top of the Anemone, and there are many of them. The Daisy Anemone, for instance, has over seven hundred feelers. Each feeler can be moved from side to side, and can also be tucked away, out of sight and out of danger; but, when hungry, the animal spreads them widely, for, as we shall see, they are the net in which it catches its dinner. The whole body of the Anemone is like two bags, one hanging inside the other. The space between the two bags is filled with water. The feelers are hollow tubes which open out of this space; so they, too, are filled with water.
The Anemone can press the water into them, and so force them to open out. In rather the same way you can expand the fingers of a glove by forcing your breath into them. The Anemone, you see, can open or close just as it pleases. What does it eat, and how does it find food? Perhaps you have watched an open Anemone in a pool, or in a glass tank, and seen it at its meals. A small creature swims near, and touches one of the feelers. Instead of darting away, it appears to be held still; and then other feelers bend towards it and hold the victim. Then they are all drawn to the centre of the Anemone, carrying their prey with them; and the feelers, prey and all, are tucked out of sight. That is the way the Anemone obtains its food. As soon as the feelers get hold of a small animal they carry it to the opening of a tube in the centre. This is the mouth, leading to the stomach. Very often the feelers, with their victim, are tucked away into the stomach, and the feelers do not appear again for some time. Is not this a strange way of eating! Much stranger still is the way in which the food is held, and made so helpless that it cannot escape. On the skin of the Anemone there are many thousands of very tiny pockets, or cells. Each cell contains a fine thread with a poisoned barb at the tip, The thread is packed away in the cell, coiled up like the spring of a watch. As soon as anything presses against the cells they shoot out their threads. Thus the tips of many poisoned threads enter the skin of any soft animal which is unlucky enough to touch an Anemone. If your own skin is tender, these little stinging hairs will irritate it, but not enough to hurt you. It is different, however, with the small creatures of the sea. They are made quite helpless when caught by hundreds of these strange threads. We shall find similar poison-threads in the Jelly-fish; and these, in some cases, can cause us serious illness. You cannot see them without the aid of a microscope. All those parts of its food which the Anemone cannot digest, it throws out again. If you feed an Anemone on raw meat, it tucks the pieces into its mouth, and, some days after, throws out the hard part of the meat, having taken all the "goodness" from it. No doubt the Anemones themselves are eaten by other animals in the sea, but many kinds of fish will not touch them. You may remember that we noticed an Anemone which lived on the stolen home of the Hermit Crab. The crab lives in the whelk shell, and the Anemone lives on the roof, as it were. In nearly every ocean, all over the world, these two partners are found, using the same shell. It is thought that the Anemone lives there for two good reasons. First, the Hermit moves from place to place; you can see that this would give the Anemone a better chance of obtaining food. Also, bits of food float to the Anemone when the crab is picking his dinner to pieces. The crab seems to like having his strange partner with him. No doubt the Anemone is of some use to him, or he would at once pull it off. It is thought that the Anemone protects him from his enemies, the fish. Some of them would swallow the whelk shell, crab and all, but they would not eat one on which an Anemone was fixed. We are not sure that these reasons are the right ones. All we know for certain is, that a crab and an Anemone have, for some good reasons, gone into partnership. Anemones have large families. Sometimes they have numbers of eggs; at other times their little ones come straight into the world as very tiny Anemones. A boy who kept a large Anemone in a tank of sea water, was astonished to find that in a short time, he had not one, but hundreds, of the creatures. The tiny Anemones were fixed to the glass and rock, all fishing for food with their little outspread tentacles. Sometimes the Anemone will calmly divide itself into two, each half becoming a perfect Anemone! Anemones are of many shapes, sizes, and colours. The loveliest of our British ones is the Plumose Anemone. It is like a carnation, and may grow to be six inches high--that is, nearly as long as this page. It is known by its shape, not by its colour. It may be any of these colours--brown, deep green, pale orange, flesh colour, cream, bright red, brick colour, lemon, or pure white. There are many other creatures in the sea which resemble plants and are often mistaken for them. The Sea Lily (p.49) is one of the flower-like animals; it is a relative of the Starfish, living in deep water. The Sea Mat (p.59) is often found on the shore. It seems like a horny kind of weed, but is really a colony of tiny animals, each one having its own little cell to live in. EXERCISES 1. How does the Anemone expand its "feelers"? 2. In what way does the Anemone catch the small animals on which it feeds? 3. Where is the mouth of the Anemone? 4. In what way might the Anemone be of use to its partner, the hermit crab?
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