Story
Katha
Poems
Folktales
Bhagavad Gita

Chapter IV - Wonder World Under Water IV [Sea Anemones and Jelly Fish] [This book has been distributed into different chapter for easier access. Picture shown - are not part of the book.]

While walking along a sandy beach. You might have come across a "flower" with many petals. If you were curious and tried to pick it up, you would have noticed that the flower was only the top of a long soft "stalk". And if you were patient enough to watch it for sometime, you would have seen the petals slowly waving to and fro.

It so resembles a flower that even its name is "sea anemone", but actually it is one of many animals, which exhibit a radial symmetry. If you draw a vertical line in the middle of a person's photograph you will find that the left side is a mirror image of the right. This is called bilateral symmetry. Some animals, however, can have many lines drawn through them, which divide the body into symmetrical parts; this is radial symmetry.

The sea anemone has a hollow body with its mouth at the top in the center of a whorl of many finger-like projections called tentacles. On these tentacles are many minute stinging cells, and when small fish or other animals brush against them, poison from the stinging cells is injected into them as if from so many syringes. The poison paralyses the prey; the tentacles then hold it and push it through the mouth into the hollow body, which serves as a stomach. After some time, the undigested wastes are thrown out of the mouth. The sea anemone has no eyes and so it cannot see.

The sea anemone normally lives fixed by the base to one place, but it can move slowly. When it wants to multiply, it simply splits and each section grows to from two complete animals.

Imagine the sea anemone shrunk to a few millimeters, and you have its cousin, the fresh water Hydra. It is a single animal, but many other live together in colonies. The colony starts life as an animal, and so on, till we have a branched, feathery colony. Even though the animals are so on, the stinging cells of some forms are so powerful that, when touched, we feel as much pain as if stung by a red ant.

In the sea pen, the animals are on either side of a long, central stem, which looks like a quill. In the sea fan, there are many branches arising from a base, used for anchoring to a stone. The branches fuse with each other into one plane to resemble a hand-held fan.

In corals, the animals extract lime from seawater to build a skeleton pitted with cup-like holes. The animals normally withdraw into these cups, but extend out of these at night. In the tissues of many corals are tiny, one-celled plants. These use carbon dioxide and the wastes of the coral to manufacture their food. Reef building corals, therefore, live in shallow seas where these plants can get sunlight. Corals come in many shapes, like the stag-horn coral, brush coral, pillar coral, finger coral, flower coral, tree coral, cluster coral, etc. In the brain coral, the skeleton is round and has furrows that look like those on our brain. The polypes of corals come in all the colors of the rainbow, and a coral reef is a really pretty sight. But, when thee polypes die, only the white skeleton remains. Although corals are small, they build immense reefs. Many islands in the middle of the ocean, such as Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea off Kerala, are made entirely of coral. Corals also abound in the Gulf of Kutch at Port Okha and Pirotan, and also fringe the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

In other forms, the polypes do not look alike and perform different tasks. Thus, in the Portuguese man-of-was one-polype acts as a float, others with their long tentacles catch food by poisoning with their stinging cells, and yet others serve for reproduction. The Portuguese man-of-war can kill even large animals, but one fish, Nomeus, is immune to its poison and shelters between the tentacles of the Portuguese man-of-war.

Porpita looks like a dark blue, flat disc about the size of a rupee coin and is a colony of polypes. In the by-the-wind sailor, there is a flat vertical "sail" on the top of the disc, which helps the animal drift with the wind.

A cousin of the sea anemone is the jellyfish, but, while the former lives attached to one place, jellyfish drift lazily. The body is soft and a translucent white, and feels like the fruit of the Palmyra palm. It is a bell-shaped, and, when the muscles in its body contract, water is forced out from the rim so as to propel the animal in opposite direction. Hanging down from the center of the bell is the mouth, and along the rim of the bell may be four or more branched tentacles bearing stinging cells. Through the glassy flesh can be seen four U-shaped orange reproductive organs. They release the milt and eggs into the water, which then combines to make baby jellyfish. Some jellyfish are so poisonous that their sting can kill a man. Jellyfish range in size from a centimeter to half a meter.

Distant cousins of the jellyfish are the comb jellies. These too are glassy and soft, but they have eight rows of hair-like cilia, whose beats enable the animal to swim. A pair of long, hair-like sticky tentacles helps them catch their food. Many comb jellies are round, like small grapes, but the Venus's girdle is very long and flat, and looks like a belt.

Continue to Chapter V - Wonder World Under Water V [Moss Animals & Worms]