WHY THE THAMES MUD IS RED IN WINTER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIII, 6 August 1929, Page 7

WHY THE THAMES MUD IS RED IN WINTER

. The foreshore of mud that is left by the receding Thames tide below Hie big electric power station of Lots road, in London, is turned to red. beneath tho rays of the setting sun in winter. The mud actually is the colour of blood, and it is blood which to it its hue. It was thought that this colouring was due to some tiny weeds or algae which grew on the mud, but a biologist examined some of the mud and found that the coloured mud is due to the presence-on top of .,^— luft there by the falling 'tide—of millions and millions of tiny, threadtike worms, about one-third to half. an inch Jong. Those worms are annelids, or V' n f? d worms, and the name of them is lubilcx. They are in one way peculiar: they havo blood inside them to carry the oxygen which keeps them alive, but their blood is not in corpuscles, as it is in our bodies. It is just free haemoglobin, the red colouring matter of blood, -tho higher animals carry their supply of haemoglobin in tiny platelets j the iubi ox which was created long before any higher animal that lives in London, parries its haemoglobin loose. It is this haemoglobin which colours the mud of ttie inames, and there must be, without any exaggeration, tons of it to the mile rhe colour is not often to be noticed in summer, if at all, the reason being that when the tide falls Tubifex is usually active enough to burrow at once into the mud on which he feeds. But in muter he is rendered much less active by the cold, and is left on top of the mud • / H