Читать книгу Pearls & Parasites - Sir A. E. Shipley - Страница 7
ОглавлениеHere in the womb of the world—here on the tie-ribs of earth. Rudyard Kipling.
The first recorded attempt to sound the depths of the ocean was made early in the year 1521, in the South Pacific, by Ferdinand Magellan. He had traversed the dangerous straits destined to bear his name during the previous November, and emerged on the 28th of that month into the open ocean. For three months he sailed across the Pacific, and in the middle of March, 1521, came to anchor off the islands now known as the Philippines. Here Magellan was killed in a conflict with the natives. The records of his wonderful feat were brought to Spain during the following year by one of his ships, the Victoria; and amidst the profound sensation caused by the news of this voyage, which has been called ‘the greatest event in the most remarkable period of the world’s history,’ it is probable that his modest attempt to sound the ocean failed to attract the attention it deserved. Magellan’s sounding-lines were at most some two hundred fathoms in length, and he failed to touch bottom; from which he ‘somewhat naïvely concluded that he had reached the deepest part of the ocean.’
It was more than two hundred years later that the first serious study of the bed of the sea was undertaken by the French geographer Philippe Buache, who first introduced the use of isobathic curves in a map which he published in 1737. His view, that the depths of the ocean are simply prolongations of the conditions existing in the neighbouring sea-coasts, though too wide in its generalization, has been shown to be true as regards the sea-bottom in the immediate vicinity of Continental coasts and islands; and undoubtedly it helped to attract attention to the problem of what is taking place at the bottom of the sea.
Actual experiment, however, advanced but slowly. So early as the fifteenth century, an ingenious Cardinal, one Nicolaus Cusanus (1401–1464), had devised an apparatus consisting of two bodies, one heavier and one lighter than water, which were so connected that when the heavier touched the bottom the lighter was released. By calculating the time which the latter took in ascending, attempts were made to arrive at the depths of the sea. A century later Puehler made similar experiments; and after another interval of a hundred years, in 1667 we find the Englishman Robert Hooke continuing on the same lines various bathymetric observations; but the results thus obtained were fallacious, and the experiments added little or nothing to our knowledge of the nature of the bottom of the ocean. In the eighteenth century Count Marsigli attacked many of the problems of the deep sea. He collected and sifted information which he derived from the coral-fishers; he investigated the deposits brought up from below, and was one of the earliest to test the temperature of the sea at different depths. In 1749 Captain Ellis found that a thermometer, lowered on separate occasions to depths of 650 fathoms and 891 fathoms respectively, recorded, on reaching the surface, the same temperature—namely, 53°. His thermometer was lowered in a bucket ingeniously devised so as to open as it descended and close as it was drawn up. The mechanism of this instrument was invented by the Rev. Stephen Hales, D.D., of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the friend of Pope, and perpetual curate at Teddington Church. Dr. Hales was a man of many inventions, and, amongst others, he is said to have suggested the use of the inverted cup placed in the centre of a fruit-pie in which the juice accumulates as the pie cools. His device of the closed bucket with two connected valves was the forerunner of the numerous contrivances which have since been used for bringing up sea-water from great depths.
These were amongst the first efforts made to obtain a knowledge of deep-sea temperatures. About the same time experiments were being made by Bouguer and others on the transparency of sea-water. It was soon recognized that this factor varies in different seas; and an early estimate of the depth of average sea-water sufficient to cut off all light placed it at 656 feet. The colour of the sea and its salinity were also receiving attention, notably at the hands of the distinguished chemist Robert Boyle, and of the Italian, Marsigli, mentioned above. To the latter, and to Donati, a fellow-countryman, is due the honour of first using the dredge for purposes of scientific inquiry. They employed the ordinary oyster-dredge of the local fishermen to obtain animals from the bottom.
The invention of the self-registering thermometer by Cavendish, in 1757, provided another instrument essential to the investigation of the condition of things at great depths; and it was used in Lord Mulgrave’s expedition to the Arctic Sea in 1773. On this voyage attempts at deep-sea soundings were made, and a depth of 683 fathoms was registered. During Sir James Ross’s Antarctic Expedition (1839–1843) the temperature of the water was constantly observed to depths of 2,000 fathoms. His uncle, Sir John Ross, had twenty years previously, on his voyage to Baffin’s Bay, made some classical soundings. One, two miles from the coast, reached a depth of 2,700 feet, and brought up a collection of gravel and two living crustaceans; another, 3,900 feet in depth, yielded pebbles, clay, some worms, crustacea, and corallines. Two other dredgings, one at 6,000 feet, the other at 6,300 feet, also brought up living creatures; and thus, though the results were not at first accepted, the existence of animal life at great depths was demonstrated.
With Sir James Ross’s expedition we may be said to have reached modern times: his most distinguished companion, Sir Joseph Hooker, is still living. It is impossible to do more than briefly refer to the numerous expeditions which have taken part in deep-sea exploration during our own times. The United States of America sent out, about the time of Ross’s Antarctic voyage, an expedition under Captain Wilkes, with Dana on board as naturalist. Professor Edward Forbes, who ‘did more than any of his contemporaries to advance marine zoology,’ joined the surveying ship Beacon in 1840, and made more than one hundred dredgings in the Ægean Sea. Lovén was working in the Scandinavian waters. Mr. H. Goodsir sailed on the Erebus with Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated Polar Expedition; and such notes of his as were recovered bear evidence of the value of the work he did. The Norwegians, Michael Sars and his son, G. O. Sars, had by the year 1864 increased their list of species living at a depth of between 200 and 300 fathoms, from nineteen to ninety-two. Much good work was done by the United States navy and by surveying ships under the auspices of Bache, Bailey, Maury, and de Pourtalès. The Austrian frigate Novara, with a full scientific staff, circumnavigated the world in 1857–1859. In 1868 the Admiralty placed the surveying ship Lightning at the disposal of Professor Wyville Thomson and Dr. W. B. Carpenter for a six weeks’ dredging trip in the North Atlantic; and in the following year the Porcupine, by permission of the Admiralty, made three trips under the guidance of Dr. W. B. Carpenter and Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys.
Towards the end of 1872 H.M.S. Challenger left England to spend the following three years and a half in traversing all the waters of the globe. This was the most completely equipped expedition which has left any land for the investigation of the sea, and its results were correspondingly rich. They have been worked out by naturalists of all nations, and form the most complete record of the fauna and flora, and of the physical and chemical conditions of the deep, which has yet been published. It is from Sir John Murray’s summary of the results of the voyage that many of these facts are taken. Since the return of the Challenger there have been many expeditions from various lands, but none so complete in its conception or its execution as the British Expedition of 1872–1875. The U.S.S. Blake, under the direction of A. Agassiz, has explored the Caribbean Sea; and the Albatross, of the same navy, has sounded the Western Atlantic. Numerous observations made by the German ships Gazelle and Drache, and Plankton Expedition, the Norwegian North Atlantic Expedition, the Italian ship Washington, the French ships Travailleur and Talisman, the Prince of Monaco’s yachts, Hirondelle and Princesse Alice, under his own direction, the Austrian ‘Pola’ Expedition, the Russian investigations in the Black Sea, and lastly, by the ships of our own navy, have, during the last five-and-twenty years, enormously increased our knowledge of the seas and of all that in them is. This knowledge is still being added to. At the present time the collections of the German ship Valdivia and of the Dutch Siboga Expedition are being worked out, and are impatiently awaited by zoologists and geographers of every country. The Discovery and the Gauss, although primarily fitted for ice-work, have added much to what is known of the sea-bottom of the Antarctic; and amongst men of science there is no abatement of interest and curiosity as to that terra incognita.
Before we attempt to describe the conditions which prevail at great depths of the ocean, a few words should be said as to the part played by cable-laying in the investigation of the subaqueous crust of the earth. This part, though undoubtedly important, is sometimes exaggerated; and we have seen how large an array of facts has been accumulated by expeditions made mainly in the interest of pure science. The laying of the Atlantic cable was preceded, in 1856, by a careful survey of a submerged plateau, extending from the British Isles to Newfoundland, by Lieutenant Berryman of the Arctic. He brought back samples of the bottom from thirty-four stations between Valentia and St. John’s. In the following year Captain Pullen, of H.M.S. Cyclops, surveyed a parallel line slightly to the north. His specimens were examined by Huxley, and from them he derived the Bathybius, a primeval slime which was thought to occur widely spread over the sea-bottom. The interest in this ‘Urschleim’ has, however, become merely historic, since John Y. Buchanan, of the Challenger, showed that it is only a gelatinous form of sulphate of lime thrown down from the sea-water by the alcohol used in preserving the organisms found in the deep-sea deposits.
The important generalizations of Dr. Wallich, who was on board H.M.S. Bulldog, which, in 1860, again traversed the Atlantic to survey a route for the cable, largely helped to elucidate the problems of the deep. He noticed that no algæ live at a depth greater than 200 fathoms; he collected animals from great depths, and showed that they utilize in many ways organisms which fall down from the surface of the water; he noted that the conditions are such that, whilst dead animals sink from the surface to the bottom, they do not rise from the bottom to the surface; and he brought evidence forward in support of the view that the deep-sea fauna is directly derived from shallow-water forms. In the same year in which Wallich traversed the Atlantic, the telegraph cable between Sardinia and Bona, on the African coast, snapped. Under the superintendence of Fleeming Jenkin, some forty miles of the cable, part of it from a depth of 1,200 fathoms, was recovered. Numerous animals, sponges, corals, polyzoa, molluscs, and worms were brought to the surface, adhering to the cable. These were examined and reported upon by Professor Allman, and subsequently by Professor A. Milne Edwards; and, as the former reports, we ‘must therefore regard this observation of Mr. Fleeming Jenkin as having afforded the first absolute proof of the existence of highly organized animals living at a depth of upwards of 1,000 fathoms.’ The investigation of the animals thus brought to the surface revealed another fact of great interest, namely, that some of the specimens were identical with forms hitherto known only as fossils. It was thus demonstrated that species hitherto regarded as extinct are still living at great depths of the ocean.
During the first half of the last century an exaggerated idea of the depth of the sea prevailed, due in a large measure to the defective sounding apparatus of the time. Thus Captain Durham, in 1852, recorded a depth of 7,730 fathoms in the South Atlantic, and Lieutenant Parker mentions one of 8,212 fathoms—depths which the Challenger and the Gazelle corrected to 2,412 and 2,905 fathoms respectively. The deepest parts of the sea, as revealed by recent research, do not lie, as many have thought, in or near the centres of the great oceans, but in the neighbourhood of, or at no great distance from, the mainland, or in the vicinity of volcanic islands. One of the deepest ‘pockets’ yet found is probably that sounded by the American expedition on board the Tuscarora (1873–1875) east of Japan, when bottom was only reached at a depth of 4,612 fathoms. More recently, soundings of 5,035 fathoms have been recorded in the Pacific, in the neighbourhood of the Friendly Islands, and south of these again, one of 5,113 fathoms; but the deepest of all lies north of the Carolines, and attains a depth of 5,287 fathoms. It thus appears that there are ‘pockets’ or pits in the sea whose depth below the surface of the water is about equal to the height of the highest mountains taken from the sea-level. Both are insignificant in comparison with the mass of the globe; and it is sometimes said that, were the seas gathered up, and the earth shrunk to the size of an orange, the mountain ranges and abysmal depths would not be more striking than are the small elevations and intervening depressions on the skin of the fruit.
But it is not with these exceptional abysses that we have to do; they are as rare and as widely scattered as great mountain-ranges on land. It is with the deep sea, as opposed to shoal water and the surface layers, that this article is concerned; but the depth at which the sea becomes ‘deep’ is to some extent a matter of opinion. Numerous attempts, headed by that of Edward Forbes, have been made to divide the sea into zones or strata; and, just as the geological strata are characterized by peculiar species, so, in the main, the various deep-sea zones have their peculiar fauna. These zones, however, are not universally recognized; and their limits, like those of the zoogeographical regions on land, whilst serving for some groups of animals, break down altogether as regards others. There are, however, two fairly definite regions in the sea; and the limit between them is the very one for our purpose. This limit separates the surface waters, which are permeable by the light of the sun and in which owing to this life-giving light, algæ and vegetable organisms can live, from the deeper waters which the sun’s rays cannot reach, and in which no plant can live. The regions pass imperceptibly into one another; there is no sudden transition. The conditions of life gradually change, and the precise level at which vegetable life becomes impossible varies with differing conditions. With strong sunlight and a smooth sea, the rays penetrate further than if the light be weak and the waters troubled.
Speaking generally, we may place the dividing-line between the surface layer and the deep sea at 300 fathoms. Below this no light or heat from the sun penetrates; and it is the absence of these factors that gives rise to most of the peculiarities of the deep sea. It is a commonplace, which every schoolboy now knows, that all animal life is ultimately dependent on the food-stuffs stored up by green plants; and that the power which such plants possess of fixing the carbonic acid of the surrounding medium, and building it up into more complex food-stuffs, depends upon the presence of their green colouring matter (chlorophyll), and is exercised only in the presence of sunlight. But, as we have pointed out, ‘the sun’s perpendicular rays’ do not ‘illumine the depths of the sea’; they hardly penetrate 300 fathoms. This absence of sunlight below a certain limit, and the consequent failure of vegetable life, gave rise at one time to the belief that the abysses of the ocean were uninhabited and uninhabitable; but, as we have already seen, this view has long been given up.
The inhabitants of the deep sea cannot, any more than other creatures, be self-supporting. They prey on one another, it is true; but this must have a limit, or very soon there would be nothing left to prey upon. Like the inhabitants of great cities, the denizens of the deep must have an outside food-supply, and this they must ultimately derive from the surface layer.
The careful investigation of life in the sea has shown that not only the surface layer, but all the intermediate zones teem with life. Nowhere is there a layer of water in which animals are not found. But, as we have seen, the algæ upon which the life of marine animals ultimately depends, live only in the upper waters; below 100 fathoms they begin to be rare, and below 200 fathoms they are absent. Thus it is evident that those animals which live in the surface layers have, like an agricultural population, their food-supply at hand, while those that live in the depths must, like dwellers in towns, obtain it from afar. Many of the inhabitants of what may be termed the middle regions are active swimmers, and these undoubtedly from time to time visit the more densely peopled upper strata. They also visit the depths and afford an indefinite food-supply to the deep-sea dwellers.
But probably by far the larger part of the food consumed by abysmal creatures consists of the dead bodies of animals which sink down like manna from above. The surface layers of the ocean teem with animal and vegetable life. Every yachtsman must at times have noticed that the sea is thick as a purée with jelly-fish, or with those little transparent, torpedo-shaped creatures, the Sagitta. What he will not have noticed, unless he be a microscopist, is that at almost all times the surface is crowded with minute organisms, foraminifera, radiolaria, diatoms. These exist in quite incalculable numbers, and reproduce their kind with astounding rapidity. They are always dying, and their bodies sink downwards like a gentle rain.[1] In such numbers do they fall, that large areas of the ocean bed are covered with a thick deposit of their shells. In the shallower waters the foraminifera, with their calcareous shells, prevail, but over the deeper abysses of the ocean they take so long in falling that the calcareous shells are dissolved in the water, which contains a considerable proportion of carbonic acid gas, and their place is taken by the siliceous skeletons of the radiolarians and diatoms. Thus there is a ceaseless falling of organisms from above, and it must be from these that the dwellers of the deep ultimately obtain their food. As Mr. Kipling in his ‘Seven Seas,’ says of the deep-sea cables:
‘The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar—
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.’
In trying to realize the state of things at the bottom of the deep sea, it is of importance to recognize that there is a wonderful uniformity of physical conditions là-bas. Climate plays no part in the life of the depths; storms do not ruffle their inhabitants; these recognize no alternation of day or night; seasons are unknown to them; they experience no change of temperature. Although the abysmal depths of the polar regions might be expected to be far colder than those of the tropics, the difference only amounts to a degree or so—a difference which would not be perceptible to us without instruments of precision. The following data show how uniform temperature is at the bottom of the sea.
In June, 1883, Nordenskiöld found on the eastern side of Greenland the following temperatures: at the surface 2·2° C.; at 100 metres 5·7° C.; at 450 m. 5·1° C. In the middle of December, 1898, the German deep-sea expedition, while in the pack-ice of the Antarctic, recorded the following temperatures: at the surface −1° C.; at 100 m.-1·1° C.; at 400 m. 1·6° C.; at 1,000–1,500 m. 1·6° C.; at 4,700 m.-0·5° C. These may be compared with some records made in the Sargasso Sea by the Plankton Expedition in the month of August, when the surface registered a temperature of 24° C.; 195 m. one of 18·8° C.; 390 m. one of 14·9° C.; and 2,060 m. one of 3·8° C. It is thus clear that the temperature at the bottom of the deep sea varies but a few degrees from the freezing-point; and, whether in the tropics or around the poles, this temperature does not undergo anything like the variations to which the surface of the earth is subjected.
There are, however, some exceptions to this statement. The Mediterranean, peculiar in many respects, is also peculiar as to its bottom temperature. In August, 1881, the temperature, as taken by the Washington, was at the surface 26° C.; at 100 m. 14·5° C.; at 500 m. 14·1° C.; and from 2,500 m. to 3,550 m. 13·3° C. These observations agree, within one-fifth of a degree, with those recorded later by Chun in the same waters. There are also certain areas near the Sulu Islands where, with a surface temperature of 28° C., the deep sea, from 730 m. to 4,660 m., shows a constant temperature of 10·3° C.; and again, on the westerly side of Sumatra, the water, from 900 m. downwards, shows a constant temperature of 5·9° C.; whilst in the not far distant Indian Ocean it sinks at 1,300 m. to 4° C., and at 1,700 m. to 3° C. In spite of these exceptions, we may roughly say that all deep-sea animals live at an even temperature, which differs by but a few degrees from the freezing-point. Indeed, the heating effect of the sun’s rays is said not to penetrate, as a rule, further than 90 to 100 fathoms, though in the neighbourhood of the Sargasso Sea it undoubtedly affects somewhat deeper layers. In the Mediterranean the heat-rays probably do not penetrate more than 50 fathoms. Below these limits all seasonable variations cease. Summer and autumn, spring and winter, are unknown to the dwellers of the deep; and the burning sun of the tropical noonday, which heats the surface water to such a degree that the change of temperature from the lower waters to the upper proves fatal to many delicate animals when brought up from the depths, has no effect on the great mass of water below the 100-fathom line.
Again, in the depths the waters are still. A great calm reigns. The storms which churn the upper waters into tumultuous fury have but a superficial effect, and are unfelt at the depth of a few fathoms. Even the great ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream, are but surface currents, and their influence is probably not perceptible below 200 fathoms. There are places, as the wear and tear of telegraphic cables show, where deep-sea currents have much force; but these are not common. We also know that there must be a very slow current flowing from the poles towards the Equator. This replaces the heated surface waters of the tropics, which are partly evaporated and partly driven by the trade-winds towards the poles. Were there no such current, the waters round the Equator, in spite of the low conductivity of salt water, would, in the course of ages, be heated through. But this current is almost imperceptible; on the whole, no shocks or storms disturb the peace of the oceanic abyss.
An interesting result of this is that many animals, which in shallower waters are subject to the strain and stress of tidal action or of a constant stream, and whose outline is modified by these conditions, are represented in the depths by perfectly symmetrical forms. For instance, the monaxonid sponges from the deep sea have a symmetry as perfect as a lily’s, whilst their allies from the shallower seas, subject as they are to varying tides and currents, are of every variety of shape, and their only common feature is that none of them are symmetrical. This radial symmetry is especially marked in the case of sessile animals, those whose ‘strength is to sit still,’ attached by their base to some rock or stone, or rooted by a stalk into the mud. Such animals cannot move from place to place, and, like an oyster, are dependent for their food on such minute organisms as are swept towards them in the currents set by the action of their cilia. A curious and entirely contrary effect is produced by this stillness on certain animals, which, without being fixed, are, to say the least, singularly inert. The sea-cucumbers or holothurians, which can be seen lying still as sausages in any shallow sub-tropical waters, are nevertheless rolled over from time to time, and present now one, now another, surface to the bottom. These have retained the five-rayed symmetry, which is so eminently characteristic of the group Echinoderma, to which they belong. But the holothurians in the deep sea, where nothing rolls them about, continue throughout life to present the same surface to the bottom; and these have developed a secondary bilateral symmetry, so that, like a worm or a lobster, they have definite upper and lower surfaces. These bilateral holothurians first became known by the dredgings of the Challenger, and formed one of the most important additions to our knowledge of marine zoology for which we are indebted to that expedition.
At the bottom of the sea there is no sound—
‘There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.’
The world down there is cold and still and noiseless. Nevertheless, many of the animals of the depths have organs to which by analogy an auditory function has been assigned. But it must not be forgotten that even in the highest land-vertebrates the ear has two functions. It is at once the organ of hearing and of balancing. Part of the internal ear is occupied with orientating the body. By means of it we can tell whether we are keeping upright, going uphill or descending, turning to the right or to the left; and it is probably this function which is the chief business of the so-called ears of marine animals. Professor Huxley once said that, unless one became a crayfish, one could never be sure what the mental processes of a crayfish were. This is doubtless true; but experiment has shown, both in crayfishes and cuttlefishes, that, if the auditory organ be interfered with or injured, the animal loses its sense of direction and staggers hither and thither like a drunken man. It is obvious that animals which move about at the bottom require such balancing organs quite as much as those which skim the surface, and it is in no wise remarkable that such organs should be found in those dwellers in the deep which move from place to place.
If we could descend to the depths and look about us, we should find the bottom of the sea near the land carpeted with deposits washed down from the shore and carried out to sea by rivers, and dotted over with the remains of animals and plants which inhabit shoal waters. This deposit, derived from the land, extends to a greater or less distance around our coast-line. In places this distance is very considerable. The Congo is said to carry its characteristic mud 600 miles out to sea, and the Ganges and the Indus to carry theirs 1,000 miles; but sooner or later we should pass beyond the region of coast mud and river deposit, the seaward edge of which is the ‘mud-line’ of Sir John Murray.
When we get beyond the mud-line, say a hundred miles from the Irish or American coast, we should find that the character of the sea-bottom has completely changed. Here we should be on Rudyard Kipling’s ‘great grey level plains of ooze.’ All around us would stretch a vast dreary level of greyish-white mud, due to the tireless fall of the minute globigerina shells mentioned above. This rain of foraminifera is ceaseless, and serves to cover rock and stone alike. It is probably due to this chalky deposit that so many members of the ‘Benthos’—a term used by Haeckel to denote those marine animals which do not swim about or float, but which live on the bottom of the ocean either fixed or creeping about—are stalked. Many of them, whose shoal-water allies are without a pedicel, are provided with stalks; and those whose shallow-water congeners are stalked are, in the depths, provided with still longer stalks. Numerous sponges—the alcyonarian Umbellula, the stalked ascidians, and, above all, the stalked crinoids—exemplify this point.
Flat as the Sahara, and with the same monotony of surface, these great plains stretch across the Atlantic, dotted here and there with a yet uncovered stone or rock dropped by a passing iceberg. In the deeper regions of the ocean—where, as we have already seen, occasional pits and depressions occur, and great ridges arise to vex the souls of the cable-layers—the globigerina ooze is replaced by the less soluble siliceous shells of the radiolarians and diatoms. The former are largely found in pits in the Pacific, the latter in the Southern Seas. But there is a third deposit which occurs in the deeper parts of the ocean—the red clay. This is often partly composed of the empty siliceous shells just mentioned; but over considerable areas of the Pacific the number of these shells is very small, and here it would seem that the red clay is largely composed of the ‘horny fragments of dead surface-living animals, of volcanic and meteoric dust, and of small pieces of water-logged pumice-stone.’ On whichever deposit we found ourselves, could we but see the prospect, we should be struck with the monotony of a scene as different as can well be imagined from the variegated beauty of a rock-pool or a coral island lagoon.
There is, however, an abundance of animal life. The dredge reveals a surprising variety and wealth of form. Sir John Murray records ‘at station 146 in the Southern Ocean, at a depth of 1,375 fathoms, that 200 specimens captured belonged to 59 genera and 78 species.’ He further states that this was ‘probably the most successful haul, as regards number, variety, novelty, size, and beauty of the specimens,’ up to the date of the dredging; but even this was surpassed by the captures from the depths at station 147. The Southern Ocean is particularly well populated. The same writer says: ‘The deep-sea fauna of the Antarctic has been shown by the Challenger to be exceptionally rich, a much larger number of species having been obtained than in any other region visited by the expedition; and the Valdivia’s dredgings, in 1898, confirm this.’ There seems to be no record of such a wealth of species in depths of less than 50 fathoms, and we are justified in the belief that the great depths are extremely rich in species.
The peculiar conditions under which the Benthos live have had a marked influence on their structure. Representatives of nearly all the great divisions of the animal kingdom which occur in the sea are found in the depths. Protozoa, sponges, cœlenterata, round-worms, annelids, crustacea, polyzoa, brachiopoda, molluscs, echinoderms, ascidians, fishes, crowd the sea-bottom. The Valdivia has brought home even deep-sea ctenophores and sagittas, forms hitherto associated only with life at the surface. The same expedition also secured adult examples of the wonderful free-swimming holothurian, Pelagothuria ludwigi, which so curiously mimics a jelly-fish. It was taken in a closing-net at 400 to 500 fathoms near the Seychelles. Most of these animals bear their origin stamped on their structure, so that a zoologist can readily pick out from a miscellaneous collection of forms those which have a deep-sea home. We have already referred to a certain ‘stalkiness,’ which lifts the fixed animals above the slowly deepening ooze. Possibly the long-knobbed tentacles of the deep-sea jelly-fish, Pectis, on the tips of which it is thought the creature moves about, may be connected with the same cause. The great calm of the depths and its effect upon the symmetry of the body have also been mentioned; but greater in its effect on the bodies of the dwellers in the ocean abysses is the absence of sunlight.
No external rays reach the bottom of the sea, and what light there is must be supplied by the phosphorescent organs of the animals themselves, and must be faint and intermittent. A large percentage of animals taken from the deep sea show phosphorescence when brought on deck; and it may be that this emission of light is much greater at a low temperature, and under a pressure of 1 to 2 tons on the square inch, than it is under the ordinary atmospheric conditions of the surface. The simplest form which these phosphorescent organs take is that of certain skin-glands which secrete a luminous slime. Such a slime is cast off, according to Filhol, by many of the annelids; and a similar light-giving fluid is exuded from certain glands at the base of the antenna and elsewhere in some of the deep-sea shrimps. But the most highly developed of the organs which produce light are the curious eye-like lanterns which form one or more rows along the bodies of certain fishes, notably of members of the Stomiadæ, a family allied to the salmons. From head to tail the miniature bull’s-eyes extend, like so many portholes lit up, with sometimes one or two larger organs in front of the eyes, like the port and starboard lanterns of a ship, so that when one of these fishes swims swiftly across the dim scene it must, to quote Kipling again, recall a liner going past ‘like a grand hotel.’ Sometimes the phosphorescent organ is at the tip of a barbel or tentacle, and it is interesting to note that the angler-fish of the deep sea has replaced its white lure, conspicuous in shallow water, but invisible in the dark, by a luminous process, the investigation of which leads many a creature into the enormous, toothed mouth of the fish.
A peculiar organ, known by the name ‘phæodaria,’ exists in the body of certain radiolarians found only in the deep seas. It has been suggested that this structure gives forth light; and, if this be the case, the floor of the ocean is strewn with minute glow-lamps, which perhaps give forth as much light as the surface of the sea on a calm summer’s night. There is, however, much indirect evidence that, except for these intermittent sources, the abysses of the ocean are sunk in an impenetrable gloom.
When physical conditions change, living organisms strive to adapt themselves to the changed conditions. Hence, when the inhabitants of the shallower waters made their way into the darker deeps, many of them, in the course of generations, increased the size of their eyes until they were out of all proportion to their other sense-organs. Others gave up the contest on these lines, and set about replacing their visual organs by long tactile tentacles or feelers, which are extraordinarily sensitive to external impressions. Like the blind, they endeavour to compensate for loss of sight by increased tactile perception; and in these forms the eyes are either dwindling or have quite disappeared. An instance in point is supplied by the crustacea, many of whom have not only lost their eyes, but have also lost the stalk which bore them; but amongst the crustacea some genera, such as Bathynomus, have enormous eyes with as many as four thousand facets. It is noticeable that this creature has its eyes directed downwards toward the ground and not upwards, as is the case with its nearest allies. On the whole the crustacea lose their eyes more readily, and at a less depth, than fishes. Many of the latter—e.g., Ipnops—are blind, and in others the eyes seem to be disappearing. Thus, amongst the deep-sea cod, Macrurus, those which frequent the waters down to about 1,000 fathoms, have unusually large eyes, whilst those which go down to the deeper abysses have very small ones. Many of the animals which have retained their eyes carry them at the end of processes. Chun, in his brilliant account of the voyage of the Valdivia, has figured a series of fishes whose eyes stand out from the head like a pair of binoculars; and similar ‘telescope’ eyes, as he calls them, occur on some of the eight-armed cuttle-fish. The larva of one of the fishes has eyes at the end of two stalks, each of which measures quite one-fourth of the total length of the body.
The colour of the deep-sea creatures also indicates the darkness of their habitat. Like cave-dwelling animals, or the lilac forced in Parisian cellars, many of them are blanched and pale; but this is by no means always the case. There is, in fact, no characteristic hue for the deep-sea fauna. Many of the fishes are black, and many show the most lovely metallic sheen. Burnished silver and black give a somewhat funereal, but very tasteful appearance to numbers of deep-sea fish. Others are ornamented with patches of shining copper, which, with their blue eyes, form an agreeable variety in their otherwise sombre appearance. Many of the fishes, however, present a gayer clothing. Some are violet, others pale rose or bright red. Others have a white almost translucent skin, through which the blood can be seen and its course traced even in its finer vessels. Purples and greens abound amongst the holothurians; other echinoderms are white, yellow, pink, or red. Red is, perhaps, the predominant colour of the crustacea, though it has been suggested that this colour is produced during the long passage to the surface, and that some of the bright reds which we see at the surface are unknown in the depths. Violet and orange, green and red, are the colours of the jelly-fishes and the corals.
It thus appears that there is a great variety and a great brilliancy amongst many of the bottom fauna. With the exception of blue, all colours are well represented; but the consideration of one or two facts seems to show that colour plays little part in their lives. Apart from the fact that to our eyes, at any rate, these gorgeous hues would be invisible in the depths, it is difficult to imagine that each of these gaily-coloured creatures can live amongst surroundings of its own hue. Again, it is characteristic that the colour is uniform. There is a marked absence of those stripes, bands, spots, or shading which play so large a part in the protective coloration of animals exposed to light. Although there is no protective coloration amongst the animals of the deep sea, the luminous organs, which make, for instance, some of the cuttlefishes as beautiful and as conspicuous as a firework, may, in some cases, act as warning signals. Having once established a reputation for nastiness, the more conspicuous an animal can make itself the less likely is it to be interfered with. One peculiarity connected with pigment, as yet inexplicable, is the fact that, in deep-sea animals, many of the cavities of the body are lined with a dark or, more usually, a black epithelium. The mouth, pharynx, and respiratory channels, and even the visceral cavity, of Bathysaurus and Ipnops, and indeed of all really deep-sea fishes, are black. It can be of no use to any animal to be black inside; and the only explanation hitherto given is that the deposit of pigment is the expression of some modification in the excretory processes of the abysmal fishes.
It was mentioned above that the absence of eyes is to some extent compensated by the great extension of feelers and antennæ. Many of the jelly-fishes have long free tentacles radiating in all directions; the rays of the ophiuroids are prolonged; the arms of the cuttle-fish are capable of enormous extension. The antennæ of the crustacea stretch widely through the water, and, in Aristoeopsis, cover a radius of about five times the body-length. In Nematocarcinus the walking-legs are elongated to almost the same extent; and this crustacean steps over the sea-bottom with all the delicacy of Agag. The curious arachnid-like pycnogonids have similarly elongated legs, and move about, like the ‘harvestmen’ or the ‘daddy-long-legs,’ with each foot stretched far from the body, acting as a kind of outpost. The fishes, too, show extraordinary outgrowths of this kind. The snout may be elongated till the jaws have the proportions of a pair of scissor-blades, each armed with rows of terrible teeth; or long barbels, growing out from around the mouth, sway to and fro in the surrounding water. In other cases the fins are drawn out into long streamers. All these eccentricities give the deep-sea fishes a bizarre appearance; their purpose is plainly to act as sensory outposts, warning their possessor of the presence of enemies or of the vicinity of food.
All deep-sea animals are of necessity carnivorous, and probably many of them suffer from an abiding hunger. Many of the fishes have enormous jaws, the angle of the mouth being situated at least one-third of the body-length from the anterior end. The gape is prodigious, and as the edge of the mouth is armed with recurved teeth, food once entering has little chance of escape. So large is the mouth that these creatures can swallow other fish bulkier than themselves; and certain eels have been brought to the surface which have performed this feat, the prey hanging from beneath them in a sac formed of the distended stomach and body-wall. It has been said of the desert fauna that ‘perhaps there never was a life so nurtured in violence, so tutored in attack and defence as this. The warfare is continuous from the birth to the death.’ The same words apply equally to the depths of the ocean. There, perhaps, more than anywhere else, is true the Frenchman’s description of life as the conjugation of the verb ‘I eat,’ with its terrible correlative, ‘I am eaten.’
Connected with the alimentary tract, though in some fishes shut off from it, is the air-bladder, an organ which contains air secreted from the blood, and which, amongst other functions, serves to keep the fish the right side up. The air can be reabsorbed, and is no doubt, to some extent, controlled by muscular effort; but there are times when this air-bladder is a source of danger to deep-sea fishes. When they leave the depths for shallower water, where the pressure is diminished, the air-bladder begins to expand; and, should this expansion pass beyond the control of the animal, the air-bladder will act as a balloon, and the fish will continue to rise with a rate of ascension which increases as the pressure lessens. Eventually the fish reaches the surface in a state of terrible distortion, with half its interior hanging out of its mouth. Many such victims of levitation have been picked up at sea, and from them we learnt something about deep-sea fishes before the self-closing dredge came into use.
One peculiarity of the abysmal fauna, which, to some extent, is a protection against the cavernous jaws mentioned above, is a certain ‘spininess’ which has developed even amongst genera that are elsewhere smooth. Such specific names as spinosus, spinifer, quadrispinosum, are very common in lists of deep-sea animals, and testify to the wide prevalence of this form of defence. A similar spiny character is, however, found in many polar species, even in those of comparatively shallow water; and it may be that this feature is a product of low temperature and not of low level. The same applies to the large size which certain animals attain in the depths. For instance, in the Arctic and Antarctic Seas the isopodous crustacea, which upon our coasts scarcely surpass an inch in length, grow to nine or ten inches, with bodies as big as moderate-sized lobsters. The gigantic hydroid polyps, e.g., Monocaulus imperator of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, illustrate the same tendency; and so do the enormous single spicules, several feet long and as thick as one’s little finger, of the sponge Monorhaphis. Amongst other floating molluscs at great depths, chiefly pteropods, the Valdivia captured a gigantic Carinaria over two feet in length. Of even greater zoological interest were giant specimens of the Appendicularia, which were taken at between 1,100 and 1,200 fathoms. This creature, named by Chun, Bathochordæus charon, reaches a length of about five inches, and has in its tail a notochord as big as a lamprey’s. All other genera of this group are minute, almost microscopic.
There are two other peculiarities common amongst the deep-sea fauna which are difficult to explain. One is a curious inability to form a skeleton of calcareous matter. The bones of many abysmal fishes are deficient in lime, and are fibrous or cartilaginous in composition. Their scales, too, are thin and membranous, their skin soft and velvety. The shells of deep-sea molluscs are as thin and translucent as tissue-paper; and the same is true of some brachiopods. The test of the echinoderms is often soft, and the armour of the crustacea is merely chitinous, unhardened by deposits of lime. Calcareous sponges are altogether unknown in the depths. This inability to form a hard skeleton—curiously enough this does not apply to corals—is not due to any want of calcareous salts in the bottom waters. It is known that calcium sulphate, from which animals secrete their calcium carbonate, exists in abundance; but those animals which dwell on the calcareous globigerina ooze are as soft and yielding as those which have their home on the siliceous radiolarian deposits. Animals which form a skeleton of silex do not suffer from the same inability; in fact, the deep-sea radiolarians often have remarkably stout skeletons, whilst the wonderful siliceous skeletons of the hexactinellid sponges are amongst the most beautiful objects brought up from the depths.
The second peculiarity, for which there seems no adequate reason, is the reduction and diminution in size of the respiratory organs. Amongst the crustacea, the ascidians, and the fishes this is especially marked. The gill laminæ are reduced in number and in size; and the evidence all points to the view that this simplification is not primitive but acquired, being brought about in some way by the peculiar conditions of life at great depths.
When the first attempts were made to explore the bed of the ocean, it was hoped that the sea would give up many an old-world form; that animals, known to us only as fossils, might be found lurking in the abysmal recesses of the deep; and that many a missing link would be brought to light. This has hardly proved to be the case. In certain groups animals hitherto known only as extinct, such as the stalked crinoids and certain crustacea—e.g., the Eryonidæ—have been shown to be still extant. The remarkable Cephalodiscus and Rhabdopleura, with their remote vertebrate affinities, have been dragged from their dark retreats. Haeckel regards certain of the deep-sea medusæ as archaic, and perhaps the same is true of the ascidians and holothurians; but, on the whole, the deep-sea fauna cannot be regarded as older than the other faunas of the seas. The hopes that were cherished of finding living ichthyosauri or plesiosauri, or the Devonian ganoid fishes, or at least a trilobite, or some of those curious fossil echinoderms, the cystoids and blastoids, must be given up. Certain of the larger groups peculiar to the deep sea have probably been there since remote times; but many of the inhabitants of the deep belong to the same families, and even to the same genera, as their shallow-water allies, and have probably descended in more recent times. There, in the deep dark stillness of the ocean bed, unruffled by secular change, they have developed and are developing new modifications and new forms, which are as characteristic of the deep sea as an Alpine fauna is of the mountain heights.
