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Updated: June 23, 2025
Up-to-date vessels engaged in that work have a vat of boiling water on deck, into which the tangle is plunged when it is pulled up from the bottom. This kills the starfish and is a great gain over the old system of picking them out of the tangle by hand. "But the worst of all the oyster's enemies," the director continued, "and the one on which I am working, is the oyster-drill.
"I thought at first it was something like a devilfish, or possibly an overgrown starfish, but it's too flat, and has no body that I can see," Costigan made answer. "It must be a kind of flat worm. That doesn't sound reasonable the thing must be all of a hundred meters long but there it is. The only thing left to do now, as I see it, is to try to boil him alive."
The stages through which these prickly skinned animals pass, before they reach the adult state, are wonderfully curious, and only when they are seen under the microscope can they be fully appreciated. A bolting-cloth net drawn through some of the pools will yield thousands in many stages, and we can take eggs of the common starfish and watch their growth in tumblers of water.
Were we not right to call this wonderful mouth the mouth of an ogre? Oysters, as you know, are so valuable that we rear them in special "beds." Along comes the hungry Starfish, with thousands of its relations, finding the fat oysters very good eating. They do great damage in our oyster-fisheries, and it is one long battle between them and the keepers of the "beds."
As might be expected, I found regular basaltic crystals in this valley, and also a variety of quartz ore, and other crystals, in the veins traversing the basalt. I also found the following remarkable section: This was in a side valley or ravine leading from Gregory's Valley in a southerly direction. On going down to the sea I found many species of starfish.
"A starfish!" murmured Tom. This accounted for it, and, as he looked at the monster from closer quarters, he saw that Norton had spoken the truth. Small starfish, or even large ones, two feet or more in diameter, may be seen at the seashore almost any time. Nearly always the specimens cast up on the beach are in extended form, either limp, or dead and dried.
"How quaint it would be if one could carry it about like a lantern, or have little sprats for candles. Some of the seabeasts would really be very pretty like lampshades; the blue sea-snail that glitters all over like starlight; and some of the red starfish really shine like red stars. But, naturally, I'm not looking for them here."
On flat tables were starfish lazying at full width, strewn shells, and hermit-crabs entering and leaving their captured homes. Mauve and primrose, pink and blue, green and brown, the coral plants nodded in the glittering light that filtered through the translucent brine.
It was held, following Cuvier, that the beings of the animal kingdom had been created in accordance with five preconceived types: the vertebrate, with a spinal column; the articulate, with jointed body and members, as represented by the familiar crustaceans and insects; the mollusk, of which the oyster and the snail are familiar examples; the radiate, with its axially disposed members, as seen in the starfish; and the low, almost formless protozoon, most of whose representatives are of microscopic size.
There they would dredge with 'tangles, a tangle being an iron frame with yards and yards of cotton waste dragging behind in which the spines of sea-urchins and the rough convolutions of starfish easily become entangled. Occasionally more distant trips, such as those to the Gulf Stream, would be made on the Fish Hawk, the largest of the Bureau's boats, named like all the others, after sea birds.
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