Billions of Undersea Builders

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 329, 14 April 1928, Page 24

Billions of Undersea Builders

SHE fishes of marvellous hues that swim in the coral halls have a world to live in as beautiful as themselves. Every tint of their shimmering mail is found in the corals, too, in the stony coral itself, and the tints of the animals that build them. The gardens of Earth are pleasant and fair places, but the gardens of the sea are not less lovely. Enchantment dwells where the corals are, and over all is a sense of the might, the marvel, and the great mystery of Nature. We know where the coral lies; many a ship with dead men’s bones bestrews its sea-swept masses, telling of days when we did not know where the sea architects had built their halls and forts and cities. We know now where they are; we know that the bulk of the chief islands of the Pacific Ocean are formed entirely of coral. Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, the Caroline and Marshall Islands, the Seychelles, and innumerable others, are all coral. Part of Florida is coral; the railway running out to sea from the Florida mainland is built upon coral islands. We know' all this and more, yet -we do not know how the tiniest fragment of coral is made; we do not know how the least of these islands comes to be where it is. Corel a mystery, but not more of a my. :: err than the bony frame upon which the tissue of the human body is 'hung. Coral, produced mys-

The Mystery of Coral A million little builders are at work in the sea, a thousand millions, thousands of millions of millions. They build up masses of coral. The waves dash against it and break it up; wind and wave grind coral into sand. A bird drops a seed; the seed comes into life, and more seeds fall. Flowers, shrubs and fruits appear. teriously from the body of a tiny jellylike, flower-like animal, is, after all, not more mysterious than the wax a bee makes for its comb; it is not a more astonishing product Than the little shells that form the habitation of sea animals which have to be examined under the microscope. So we see a coral polyp take up water and convert its mineral products Into stone as enduring as granite, but we do not know how. We know that the coral polyp cannot live at a greater depth than a hundred feet in ordinary instances—36o feet at most where the conditions are perfect, and, of course, always under water, yet we find coral islands rising in places three hundred feet in the air, and at another point we have found by boring that solid coral extends down for 1,150 feet. Think of a reef over a thousand miles long, such as exists off one of the coasts of Australia, a reef of pure coral, every grain of it made by the polyps. How can that colossal mass of material have been built up out of water as clear as the tinkling fluid of a crystal spring? Sir John Murray, the scientist of the Challenger expedition which explored and sounded the seas, once made an interesting experiment on this point. He had been studying corals, and had been wondering how these little animals got then- building materials together. Sir John made a test. He letdown f to Yr„ et from the ship, dragged it for half a mile through the water, hauled it up. and analysed the shells =L th i th,ngs hls net had caught. He s-t tiown his results in figures, and worked out an iV’-pni- little su n v.as somethin." j:u- e

“My net collects in half a mile so many limy shells. If these shells are

equally plentiful down to 60# there would be 16 tons of < alciuff carbonate in the shells of little mals living in one square rail# * tropical water 600 feet deep.” For a certain distance in the water* along the Equator, and north a®® south of it, coral abounds. Farth® away the line thins down; it become* less and less. Shelled life of all becomes smaller and poorer, until the deep waters of the Arctic *** Antarctic, the shells are thin and tngile, for the reason that the elenie & required are present in the sea-wa * in greatly lessened quantities, warm waters of the ocean life in incredible wealth, and coral 4s of its most conspicuous features. With the reef-builders, however, multiplication by budding is the ora _■ Day after day, year after year. ' polyps from buds are arising, . new store to the rocky mass in w all have their homes. Death re his harvest in the low-er crowns the summits with new Dirtn. We may see. then, how these masses of architecture in VJ® ’ «■ have their beginnings. The old are always dying, leaving limy tons for their successors to upon; the new generations are mto stantly adding tier to tier. stra ,-j. c stratum. The coral structure 1 . a beehive set for ever in the lhc ways growing and growingihemsclvcs * a giant whole, and, instead of it is of solid rock.