Page:The Journal of geology (IA journalofgeology21894univ).pdf/14
boring annelids or the scarlet tentacles of actinias, and the thicket is made up of pale lavender bushes of branching madrepores, and green and brown and yellow and olive masses of brain coral, of alcyonarians of all shades of yellow and purple, lilac and red, and of black and brown and red sponges. Even the lichens which incrust the rocks are hydroid corals, and the whole sea garden is a dense jungle of animals, where plant-life is represented only by a few calcareous algæ so strange in shape and texture that they are much less plant-like than the true animals.
The scarcity of plant-life becomes still more notable when we study the ocean as a whole. On land herbivorous animals are always much more abundant and prolific than the carnivora, as they must be to keep up the supply of food, but the animal life of the ocean shows a most remarkable difference, for marine animals are almost exclusively carnivorous.
The birds of the ocean, the terns, gulls, petrels, divers, cormorants, tropic birds and albatrosses, are very numerous indeed, and the only parallel to the pigeon roosts and rookeries of the land is found in the dense clouds of sea birds around their breeding grounds, but all these sea birds are carnivorous, and even the birds of the seashore subsist almost exclusively upon animals such as mollusca, crustacea and annelids.
The seals pursue and destroy fishes; the sea-elephants and walruses live upon molluscs; the whales, dolphins and porpoises and the marine reptiles all feed upon animals and most of them are fierce beasts of prey.
There are a few fishes which pasture in the fringe of seaweed which grows on the shore of the ocean, and there are some which browse among the floating tufts of algæ upon its surface, but most of them frequent these places in search of the small animals which hide among the plants.
In the Chesapeake Bay the sheepshead browses among the algæ upon the submerged rocks and piles like a marine sheep, but its food is exclusively animal, and I have lain upon the edge of a wharf watching it crunch the barnacles and young oysters until the juices of their bodies streamed out of the angles of