02 South Sea Adventure Read Free Page B

only light was a fish!
    Swimming about the small tank between the two boys, it threw out a stronger glow than that of a forty-watt bulb.
    ‘Do you find it in the manual?’ asked Roger.
    ‘Yes, here it is. A lantern fish. A good name for it!’
    The fish has a row of lights along each side, like the lighted portholes of a steamer. Then there were other lights thickly sprinkled over the back. All these lights burned continuously. But most startling were the tail lights which flashed on and off.
    Hal had just spent an hour out ahead of the ship on the tip end of the bowsprit. Standing in the pulpit and hanging onto the curved rail which half-surrounded it, he had watched the scudding sea a few feet below him. When he saw anything interesting, his hand net flashed down and up. It was in one of these strikes that he had caught the lantern fish.
    ‘What do you suppose it wants with all those lights?’ asked Roger.
    ‘Well,’ explained Hal, ‘it’s a deep-sea fish. It comes to the surface only at night. During the day it lives away down where it is always dark, night and day. So it needs lanterns to find its way about.’ ‘But the sun can shine through water,’ objected Roger.
    ‘The sunlight only goes down a thousand feet or so. Below that, if you did any deep-sea diving, you would need a lamp. On down to the bottom, a distance of a mile to six miles, there is total darkness - or would be if the fish didn’t carry lanterns.’
    ‘But what’s the idea of those flashing tail lights?’
    ‘Probably to blind enemies. Just as you would be blinded if I flashed an electric torch in your eyes. When I turned it off you wouldn’t be able to see me and I could escape.’
    ‘Pretty smart fish,’ marvelled Roger.
    Every day a net was towed behind the ship. Sometimes it was a surface net, sometimes a deep-sea trawl which collected specimens from a depth of a quarter-mile or more.
    These denizens of the deep Hal had put together in a small aquarium.
    ‘Let’s put the lantern fish in with his friends,’ suggested Roger.
    Hal scooped it up with a small net and transferred it to the deep-sea tank.
    Immediately there was wild commotion. The lantern fish was pursued by a slightly larger fish which was also sprinkled with lights. Even its fins were illuminated. From its chin dangled brilliantly lighted whiskers.
    ‘Its name is star-eater,’ said Hal.
    ‘It sure looks as if it had eaten plenty of stars,’ said Roger, following the movements of the star-spangled fish, ‘and it will eat some more if it can get that lantern fish.’
    Suddenly the lantern fish flashed its blinding tail lights. The confused star-eater stopped and its quarry escaped to hide in a far corner of the tank.
    Some of the fish gave out a green light, some yellow, some red. One carried what looked like a small electric bulb suspended in front of its face.
    But one had no lights. Hal found its description in his manual. It was blind, therefore it could not use lights to see where it was going. Instead, it was like a blind man walking down the street and tapping with his cane ahead of him. Only in this case there were about twenty canes - long feelers that spread out in every direction like reaching fingers. With these the fish could avoid bumping into unpleasant neighbours, and find its food.
    But some of the specimens were not in the manual. Hal wrote descriptions of these and made careful drawings. Perhaps they were new to science. He was their discoverer. Some of them might be named after him.
    It seemed a little absurd to Hal and Roger that they should be finding things unknown to the scientists.
    ‘But it could be.’ said Hal. ‘Last year the Smithsonian Institution made a study of fish near the Bikini atoll. Of four hundred and eighty-one species studied, seventy-nine were new. That’s one out of every six. If the same proportion holds here, one out of every six kinds of fish in that tank has never been named or described or had its picture taken