On the Seashore | Page 2

the ray
is turned right side up, and at last the Starfish turns over, and, slowly
but surely, glides away.
[Illustration: COMMON FIVE-FINGERED STARFISH.]

Stones, shells, or rocks do not stop it. The rays slide up and over them.
If we had feet like those of the Starfish, a journey up the wall of a
house, over the roof, and down again, would be nothing to us. Nature
gives all creatures the 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