The American Boy's Handy Book/Chapter 8
Near high-water mark, among the sea-weed and drift that have been washed up by a storm, is a veritable curiosity shop, and one well worth inspecting, but most of the animals to be found in this heterogeneous mass of drift, shells, plants, and pieces of wreck are either badly injured or dead, and, though many valuable specimens may here be obtained for the cabinet or museum, it is not a good place to find living, healthy animals for the aquarium.
If you are going on a collecting tour in search of living objects you must go prepared for a good rough-and-tumble time among slippery stones, muddy bottoms, or grimy old docks and piers.
You should wear no clothing that you care to preserve. Salt water will ruin shoes, so put on any old pair that will protect your feet from the shells or sharp stones; if the shoes have. holes that let the water in, console yourself with the thought that the water can run out the same way. In fact, you must be prepared for a slip-up in the mud, or a good ducking in the shallow water, where the bottom is often so slippery that it is hard to wade far without involuntarily sitting down once or twice. After you have rigged yourself out in "old togs," next equip yourself with a basket to hold upright some glass preserve-jars or a lot of wide-mouthed bottles; then, armed with a small hammer, an old case-knife or trowel, a dip-net made of coarse bagging or fine mosquito-netting, you are ready for any game from a lobster to the minute little crustacean found among the algæ.
You should time your excursion so as to be on the hunting-ground at extreme low tide. As soon as you reach the beach wade right into your work; look under the stones, scoop up the sand or mud with your net from the bottom of all the pools left by the tide, examine every promising-looking bunch of sea-weed, and before the tide comes in you will have material enough to stock forty aquariums. When you reach home sort out your specimens, discard all weak and sickly animals, and put the healthy ones in flat earthenware dishes of salt water, where they may be examined at leisure, and the proper ones taken out and put into your aquarium. In the mud and sand between the tides, or in the shallow water at extreme low tide, live many curious creatures.
If you should discover among the dirt in the bottom of your dip-net some queer-looking tubes, preserve them carefully, for they may contain some of those odd and often brilliantly colored marine worms. The inland boy, who is accustomed to see only the unsightly angle-worm, has no idea what really beautiful creatures some of the marine worms are. See, for instance, there is something in the mud that looks like a drop of blood. Put it in a plate of salt water and watch how one by one it begins to put forth its tentacles until its whole appearance is changed. This is a worm with a long scientific[1] name, which you may learn by and by if you become interested enough in your recreation to make a study of it.
Do not neglect to collect a few barnacles for your aquarium, and you will find yourself amply repaid for the trouble you found in detaching them from their native posts or rocks, when you see them each put forth an odd hand-shaped member, opening and closing the numerous long, slender fingers as if the animals inside the shells were grasping for something in the water, as, indeed, they are, for it is by this means that the little hermits in their acorn-shaped houses obtain their food.
For collecting in deep water, dredges are used; these are described among the summer sports, page 86.
- ↑ Polycirrus eximius.