Fish Can’t See Their Food

The octopus lured me back, and this time I caught him in the act of doing a skirt dance in and around his hole, and half out, with arms fully tended, he was rippling the skirts of skin that connect his tentacles, meanwhile changing from brown to mottled green to gray. He was, I gathered after a moment, practicing making like a rock. As soon as he had got just the desired effect he stopped wiggling. I hacked into his hole again to see how well he matched—which was so well that I had taken him for the real thing for a moment, and might never have found him again. But the octopus had seen me, and putting out one tentacle he elongated it so that it looked like a snake with feet. This he pointed at me, menacingly.

I backed off and pretended to be looking at a large pink sea anemone, which was groping vaguely into space with its pink arms. Slowly and delicately this creature turned a complete somersault. Attaching two of its tentacles to the rock beyond it, it carefully detaches its fat foot from the rock where it was moored, hoisted it up into the water, floated slowly over its two attached arms and came down, plump, on the other side. Getting a good grip on this new spot with its foot, the sea anemone released the two arms and once more there was a flower-like aureole around the anemone's mouthparts. All this was done in slow motion. It took ten minutes by my wristwatch.

The next event in my nocturnal study was concerned with the shapes of fishes. After staring at them for several weeks I had noticed that fishes with slender, forked tails usually had high, pointed dorsal fins, broken up into sections, while fishes with thick, solid tails generally have one long dorsal fin, smooth, narrow and continuous along the whole length of the back. I decided that the fork-tailed, split-fin types were the swift swimmers that used their bodies for locomotion and the sharp fins for steering, like oar blades. The long-finned, blunt-tailed types were slow swimmers with bulky bodies. They swam with their fins, with more haste but less speed.

There was another point I had been puzzling over for some time. The average slim, streamlined fish cannot see its food, because its eyes are planted flat along the sides of its head; and its nose is definitely in the way. As it cannot see its prey, except broadside, it really should have a mouth on each side and swim sideways. But it does not. After due investigation I found that such a fish swims up past the morsel, turns with lightning speed, and opens its mouth. And the living morsel seems to rush to meet its fate, and literally pops into the fish's mouth of its own accord.

By: davidbunch

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