Strange Fish. 1000 SPECIES.

Waikato Times, Volume 107, Issue 17973, 19 March 1930, Page 15

Strange Fish. 1000 SPECIES.

The Chinese sage who remarked that there are more fish in the sea than have ever been caught would have found his words confirmed had he known Dr Wm. Beebe. Dr Beebe has just returned from Bermuda with nearly 1000 species of fish, taken from waters where ichthyologists had previously recorded a scant 800 varieties (says the “Christian Science Monitor”).

Deep-sea fish which swim through the blackness of great depths equipped with their own “electric” lighting plants —a “cold” light which has spurred the search for a self-perpetuating source of illumination —are included in Dr Beebe’s catch. Marvellously coloured fish, which had to be quickly copied in paint before their colours faded, came up with many of the nets, each of which required two hours to be pulled to the surface so that the release from pressure of as much as 2000 pounds to the square inch would not injure the specimens. There was a black fish, shaped like a dirigible, with a tentacle ten times the length of its body trailing from its nose like the mooring rope of an airship. And there was a tiny round fish, one-twentv-fifth the size of a silver dollar, which would have grown up to bo an ocean sunfish nine feet thick ahd weighing more than one ton. The list goes on, and museum experts will work month after month classifying and reproducing the finds of Dr Beebe’s thirty-second expedition.

The operations off Nonsuch Island were greatly aided by the facilities provided by the Bermuda Government. Dr Beebe’s difficulty was not the scarcity of material, but rather that the field was so rich that he could not hope to exhaust it. The respective depth areas proved to be like the latitudes of the earth, each with its own characterise type of animal life. Those who would search the bottom of the sea for sunken gold would find but a fraction of the wealth which Dr Beebe brings to the surface—new knowledge in which jili may ultimately sharo.