IN THE SARGASSO SEA.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4882, 25 September 1925, Page 4

IN THE SARGASSO SEA.

STRANGE DENIZENS. A NATURALIST’S PARADISE. The facts about the Sargasso Sea are mi re wonderful than fiction (says Rj.: Waldo Miner, curator of the >»epartn'cnt of Marine Life, American Museum of Natural History, in an article entitled “Wnat is the Sargasso Sea ?” in the Mentor Magazine). Several million years ago, according .to geologists, when North and South America were not yet connected and Europe w*as an archipelago, a great oceanic current swept round the world in the neighbourhood of the Equator. This girdle-like stream was due to the westerly-blowing trade winds occasioned by the rotation of the earth. In the course of time .the Isthmus of Panama rose from the sea bottom, uniting the two Americas, while the various parts of the Old World joined to form the eastern continent as we see it to-day. The great equatorial current, thus bldcked in its western sweep through the Atlantic, split on the coast of South America into two streams, one moving south and the other north. The north equatorial current swept

back eastward towards, the coaist of Africa, and formed a great loop which, completed the circle by again joining the westerly equatorial current. The branchlets of the graceful sargassum weed shelter hosts of swimming, clinging, floating creatures of strange shape and habit. Shrimp, crabs, mollusea, sea spiders with spiny outgrowths end coloured to imitate the weed, hide among its. leaflets. If a branch Of weed is allowed to expand in a large jar of sea water its grace and beauty become apparent At first sight it appears empty of all animal life, but if it is shaken, in the words of Agassiz, “hundreds of many-coloured denizens are seen rushing about in all directions, eager to return .to the particular spot best adapted to conceal them; and in a few minutes only the practised eye of the naturalist can detect their presence.”

There is a remarkable nest-building fish, the “marbled angler” of brown and yellow colouration, blending exactly with the . gulf-weed, and weaving gelatinous strings of egg clusters into the plant growth with its spiny, hand-like fins. Its nest contain# thousands of eggs. The weed is so full of animal life of all igorts that it is visited by larger fish swimming up from below to

feast upon its abundance. The inhabitants of the Sargassum not thus devowered eventually die, nad their bodies continually rain down into the depth below, where the strangest creatures of all dwell in eternal darkness, .thousands of fathoms below the surface. Here fish with enormous heads and absurdly short bodies. open their wide mouths armed with needlelike teeth and engulf all that comes within reach. Others are long and eel-shaped, with vari-coloured phosphorescent lights upon the sides of their bodies that illuminate the Stygian darkness in which they live. These creatures also prey upon eSch other. Some have a jointed rod projecting over the head like a fishing pole, with a phosphorescent torch at the end. Far from being the region of dread pictured by the mediaeval mariners, the Sargasso Sea is, for the naturalist a paradise of strange and fascinating rewards.