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Updated: July 27, 2025
It places itself upon the surface of the animal on which it feeds, and, if it have any hard parts, it simply sucks the juices, dropping the dead carcass immediately after; but it swallows whole the little Acalephs of other Species and other soft animals that come in its way. Early in summer these Jelly-Fishes drop their eggs, little transparent pear-shaped bodies, covered with vibratile cilia.
Perhaps, of all the three Classes of Radiates, Acalephs are the least known.
Such is the difference between the tentacles in a Radiate and the wreath of feelers in a Worm; the external effect may be much the same; but in the former every tentacle opens into one of the chambers as in a Polyp, or connects with one of the radiating tubes as in Acalephs, or with the locomotive suckers as in Star-Fishes, and is therefore closely linked with the whole internal organization; whereas the feelers in the latter are only external appendages, in no way connected with the essential structural elements.
We will first compare the three Orders of Acalephs, Hydroids being the lowest, Discophorae; next, and the Ctenophorae highest. The fact that these animals have no popular names shows how little they are known.
One may ask how the narrow radiating tubes of the Acalephs, traversing the gelatinous mass of the body, can be compared to the wide radiating chambers of the Polyp; and yet nothing is more simple than to thicken the partitions in the Polyps so much as to narrow the chambers between them, till they form narrow alleys instead of wide spaces, and then we have the tubes of the Jelly-Fish.
The comparison of the Acalephs with the Echinoderms is still easier, for they both have tubes; but in the latter the tubes are inclosed in walls of their own, instead of traversing the mass of the body, as in Acalephs, etc.
When we speak of a Bird or an Insect, the mere name calls up at once a characteristic image of the thing; but the name of Jelly-Fish, or Sun-Fish, or Sea-Blubber, as the larger Acalephs are also called, suggests to most persons a vague idea of a fish with a gelatinous body, or, if they have lived near the sea-shore, they associate it only with the unsightly masses of jelly-like substance sometimes strewn in thousands along the beaches after a storm.
The adult animals swim admirably and are not confined to their host; as soon as the specimens of Chrysaora Blossevillei, Less., or Rhizostoma cruciatum, Less., on which they are seated, become the sport of the waves in the neighbourhood of the shore, they escape from them, and are only to be obtained from lively Acalephs.
I should add, that, beside the Polyps and the Acalephs, Mollusks also have their representatives among the Corals.
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