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Updated: June 28, 2025
The conception of adaptation applies to these also, since we find that characters consist often of weapons such as horns, antlers, and spurs, used in sexual combat, of copulatory or clasping organs such as the pads on a frog's forefeet, of ornamental plumage like the peacock's tail serving to charm the female, or of special pouches as in species of pipe-fish and frog for holding the eggs or young.
Bad swimmers by nature, utterly unarmed, and wholly undefended by protective mail, the pipe-fish generally can neither fight nor run away: and therefore they depend entirely for their lives upon their peculiar skulking and lurking habits.
There they hatch out in perfect security, free from the dangers that beset the spawn and fry of so many other less tender-hearted kinds; and as soon as the little pipe-fish are big enough to look after themselves the sac divides spontaneously down the middle, and allows them to escape, to shift for themselves in the broad Atlantic.
This stirs up the small living things, which are at once swallowed by the Pipe-fish. We have already seen how the male Pipe-fish carries his eggs in his "pocket." Another curious thing is his suit of armour. Instead of scales, he has hard plates all over his body. Very often you may see young Pipe-fish among Sprats and "Whitebait" in the fishmonger's shop.
Looked at closely with an attentive eye, the complex moving mass gradually resolves itself into two parts: one a ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating the weed itself in form and colour.
Then come yet other more progressive forms, like the great pipe-fish himself, where the folds meet so as to produce a complete sac, which opens at maturity, to let out its little inmates.
But the strangest part of it all is the fact that while in the kangaroo it is the mother who owns the pouch and takes care of the young, in the pipe-fish it is the father, on the contrary, who thus specially provides for the safety of his defenceless offspring. For the most part it must be candidly admitted by their warmest admirer, fish make very bad parents indeed.
Pintail, drake, plumage of; pairing with a wild duck. Pintail Duck, pairing with a widgeon. Pipe-fish, filamentous; marsupial receptacles of the male. Pipits, moulting of the. Pipra, modified secondary wing-feathers of male. Pipra deliciosa. Pirates stridulus, stridulation of. Pitcairn island, half-breeds on. Pithecia leucocephala, sexual differences of colour in.
Protective resemblances of the sort are extremely common among the pipe-fish family, and the reason why they should be so is no doubt sufficiently obvious at first sight to any reflecting mind such, for example, as the intelligent reader's. Pipe-fish, as everybody knows, are far from giddy. They do not swim in the vortex of piscine dissipation.
At their tip is an opening, though a very small one, and that is the mouth of the Pipe-fish. Of course, with such a mouth, the fish cannot bite its prey, and so has to suck in small creatures and swallow them. Its method of hunting them is strange. It stands on its head, as it were, takes in a mouthful of water, and spurts it out at the sandy bed of the sea.
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