SOUTH SEA CURIOSITY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 July 1938, Page 8

SOUTH SEA CURIOSITY

A WORM THAT NEVER TURNS. Of all the curiosities in the natural history of the South Seas, the mbalolo. stands first, writes Sir Basil Thomson, in the “Scene Changes.” It is a thin, jointed worm, about 18in long, which lives its life fathoms deep in the fissures of the coral reef, rising twice a year to die, phoenix-like, in the propagation of its kind. Being mere living vermicelli, with no head but a mouth, and no body but a transparent pipe, it ought to live a life of inglorious security, but it has one remarkable quality. It is a natural almanac, with a fixed day for all its appearances, and it will not turn from this fixture for all the hurricanes that ever raged south of the Line. In the mere observance of fixed intervals there would be no greater miracle than our own bodies can show. The wonder lies in the fact that: the mbalolo keeps both lunar and solar time, reconciling and adjusting them at regular intervals.

It swarms to the surface of the sea on two nights in the year—in the third quarter of the moon in October and in November, and it has never departed from that time during the century in which it has been watched by Europeans. The moon directs its choice of the day, the sun its choice of the month. It cannot maintain intervals of either T2 or 13 lunations without changing the calendar month of its reappearance. For two years it rises after the lapse of 12 lunations, and every third year at the thirteenth. Even this arrangement would gradually sunder solar and lunar time, and so to meet this difficulty it intercalates once in every 28 years an extra lunation. No one has attempted to show what are the impulses that lead it to rise on the appointed day and keep it back every three and every 28 years. I went once to a mbalolo fishing in November. The reef lay off the island of Vatuele. We set off in a sailing canoe and went seaward for more than an hour. A flotilla of canoes followed us. The pilot seemed to know the place by instinct, for presently the sail was lowered and we found that we could touch the bottom of the sea with punt poles, I stared hard at the water for some sign pf life, but there was none. The natives bade me plunge my hand down into the water, which was warmer than the air. Presently I felt a little thread of gelatine twining about my fingers like the tendrils of a plant. Then a little compact body of a dozen worms touched me, interlaced like vermicelli in clear soup. I brought it to the surface to watch it slithering away. The natives were now peering forward into the water, pointing and shouting to one another. They had seen the root of the mbalolo, which came up from the reef like a solid stem and spread all over the surface. The sea was now oily and viscid with the interlaced bodies of millions of the worms. Here and there were breaks in the mass, and one could see the stalk or pillar, about the thickness of a man’s thigh, coiling from the surface out of sight. The stalk oscillated, expanded, and contracted like the funnel of a waterspout, and its motions stirred the phosphorescence, so as to make it faintly visible. It was like a fountain of worms from some chasm in the reef.