On the Seashore | Page 2

kind of foot which suits the life they lead. And it is hard to imagine feet more useful to the Starfish than those wonderful sucker-feet!
Ask any fisherman what he thinks of the "harmless" Starfish, and he will call it a pest and a nuisance. "It gets into the crab traps," he says, "and eats all the bait. And when we are line-fishing it sucks the bait off our hooks, and sometimes swallows hook and all." Small wonder that Five-fingers, or Five-fingered Jack, as it is called, has no friend among fisher-folk.
On pulling up a useless Starfish instead of a real fish, the fisherman tears the offender in half and throws the halves back into the waves. By doing this he harms himself more than the Starfish! Each half grows into a perfect Starfish with five rays complete. We can say that each part of this animal has a separate life, for each part can grow when torn away.
If you were asked to open an oyster you would need tools, would you not? Even with an oyster-knife it is not always an easy job. The oyster, tight in his shelly fortress, seems safe from the attack of a weak Starfish. Yet the Starfish opens and eats oysters as part of its everyday life.
Finding a nice fat oyster, it sets to work. The Starfish folds its rays over its victim, with its mouth against the edge where the shells meet. The tug-of-war begins. The Starfish's tube-feet try to pull the shells apart; the oyster, with all its strength, tries to keep them shut. It is stronger than its enemy, and yet the steady pull of hundreds of suckers is more than it can stand, and the shells, after a time, begin to gape a little.
Now a strange thing happens. The mouth of the Starfish opens into a kind of bag which slips between the oyster shells. The Starfish, as it were, turns itself inside-out! It then eats the oyster and leaves the clean shell.
Mussels are smaller, so they are eaten in a different way. The Starfish merely presses the mussel into its mouth, cleans out the shells, and throws them away. Were we not right to call this wonderful mouth the mouth of an ogre?
Oysters, as you know, are so valuable that we rear them in special "beds." Along comes the hungry Starfish, with thousands of its relations, finding the fat oysters very good eating. They do great damage in our oyster-fisheries, and it is one long battle between them and the keepers of the "beds."
Supporting the tough skin of Five-fingered Jack is a wonderful skeleton. It is like a network of fine plates and rods made of lime. Perhaps you have seen one in a museum.
Five-fingers has a great number of cousins, some of them common enough along our shores. One of the strangest is the Brittle Star. On first seeing one of these animals I tried to capture it by holding its long, wriggling arms. At once the arms broke off. Then I tried to scoop the creature out of its watery home. But it began to break its "rays" off as if they were of no value whatever. To my surprise, the broken "rays" broke again while wriggling on the ground. This is a strange habit, is it not? Perhaps the Brittle Star has found this dodge useful in escaping from enemies. Anyhow, the loss of an arm or two matters little, for others grow in their place.
Another cousin of the Starfish is the Sea-urchin, a round prickly creature rather like the burr of the sweet-chestnut tree. This mass of prickles is not a vegetable; he is very much alive. Nature has given many plants and animals these prickles, like fixed bayonets, for a defence against their enemies. You will at once think of the gorse and the hedgehog, or urchin, as some people call it. Our little Sea-urchin has prickles, like the hedgehog, but he is really unlike any other living creature, except, perhaps, the Starfish.
If you were to roll up a Starfish into a ball, and then stick about three thousand spines on the ball thus made, you would have a creature looking rather like a Sea-urchin.
Beneath the mass of spines there is a hard test or shell, made of plates joined closely together; this is the skeleton of the Sea-urchin. Sometimes you find this strange shell on the seashore, rather dirty, and not always sweet-smelling. You might also find Sea-urchins half-dead, washed into the rock-pools. The shells are wonderful objects, so you should clean them in fresh water; they are well worth the trouble of taking home.
All over the shell you will see little rounded knobs. These show where the spines were fixed on; each spine fits into a hole in the shell, but so loosely