The World We Live in; Survival in the Sea

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Ever since man first gazed upon the surface of the sea, he has wanted to get

to the bottom of it. Early in his history, he fished it and learned to sail on and over, marveling at the life he saw in it. For centuries, man has sought ways to explore it. But until recent times, more explorers submerged into the sea than emerged from it. Now anybody with a face mask and aqua lungs can get a fish -eye view of the sea. The reason for all this underwater activity has been summed up by the man who said we are obsessed by the realms of oceanic life waiting to be known. But one thing has always been known about life in the sea. Shakespeare's usual said it best in a dialogue between two of his characters. I marvel how fish live in the sea said one. Why as man does on land, replied the other, the great

ones eat the small ones. Survival is the first principle of life, and in the sea most animals survive by eating other animals. This fact of predation governs the life of every animal from the moment of its birth. Even in the microscopic world of the baby crab, the struggle for life is fierce. Instead of growing up in the arms of its mother, it may end up in the tentacles of a baby jellyfish. In order to survive,

the baby crab must kill to eat as it defends itself from other infant creatures. The older it gets, the only change that takes place is the size of its appetite and its enemies. Ultimately, the crab will fall victim to the sea's law of inevitability, which states that no matter how big, mean, and hungry a creature is, it will invariably meet something that is bigger, meaner, or hungrier than itself. In

order to survive, it may end up in the arms of its mother, and it may end up in the arms of its mother. In this fish eat fish world, each species has developed its own approach to survival. A man to array, like a hero in a Greek play, doomed to eternal toil by the gods, must incessantly harvest the surface of the sea in a continual quest for food.

One of the largest creatures of the sea, laying more than a ton, it feeds on the smallest, a microscopic plankton of which it must consume millions each day. Compared to the man to array, the jellyfish is an idler, drifting with the curds. Its dome contains its mouth and stomach, which, with its stinging tentacles, is basically all that it has needed to survive for several hundred million years. While the jellyfish drifts with the curds, eating whatever it

bumps into, its first cousin, the sea anemone, remains rooted to the bottom, eating whatever bumps into it. In reality, its flower -like exterior is a set of stinging tentacles, surrounding a hungry mouth and stomach. When a fish brushes against its tentacles, the anemone stings it, and draws the paralyzed fish into its mouth, folding its tentacles over it. Some species, like the snail, which is a mala score, soft -bodied creature, developed protective shells. But while providing security, the shell is not a big deal. The shell presented a problem of mobility, to offset this,

many mollusks developed a muscular foot, which they used to crawl and grasp their prey. Some larger snails, whose shells may weigh two pounds or more, like to dine on smaller escargot. The snail surrounds its prey with its foot. It then draws its victim out of its shell, and consumes it. Of all the predatory animals in the

sea, few can surpass the barracuda, which even as an infant, a few inches long, is a hunter -par excellence. It attacks with a speed that is difficult to capture even in slow motion. With a body streamlined to move rapidly in water, balanced fins with which to steer, and several rows of teeth to seize hold and devour its prey, the barracuda is a product of an overall chain of development that began more than 600 million years ago, when the oceans were first formed. Then the waters were wide, warm, and shallow. Life began in the sea, first as microscopic living things, that developed into plants and simple animals, and eventually into fish.

Jawless with no real head, cylindrical in shape, with rudimentary fins and armoured back, the astracaderms were the ancestors of the mollum. After their arrival, three major developments took place. Fish evolved jaws with which to feed freely, fins with which to balance and steer, and scales to replace their shell -like armour. At one time reptiles were the dominant predators of the sea, but even as they reigned modern fish were evolving. Today, ectheologists have identified some 20 ,000 species of so -called higher bony fish, a survive in a multitude of environments that range from the depths of the ocean to its surface, from the tropics to the Arctic. In lakes, bays, estuaries, rivers, brooks, taunts, and

caves. And in the process they have learned, when necessary, to breathe air, walk, fly, crawl, bear young alive, live on and off others, emit light, and acquire a variety of shapes, sizes, and colours that be dazzle the eye and confuse the senses. Despite the multitudes of the sea, life is orderly, and is structured upon a pyramid that involves every creature from the largest to the smallest. At the bottom of the pyramid are an almost infinite number of tiny plants and animals called plankton, meaning that which is born to drift, carried by the currents and dispersed throughout the ocean, many rise at night to the surface, glowing with phosphorescent light. The chain of life begins with a

phytoplankton, microscopic plants such as diatoms, which convert the energy of sunlight and minerals from the sea into food to sustain their life. In turn, they are fed upon by tiny animals called zooplankton. Many of these feed not only on plants, but on other zooplankton as well. Zooplankton range in size from inches to 1 ,000th of an inch. Some are no more than floating mouths and stomachs. Others, like the rarely seen flapping snail, are larvae of larger animals. Many of these creatures have hearts that beat regularly and blood that flows like alternating current.

Plankton appear in an enormous variety of shaped sizes and colors. Many species are so seldom seen they are still unknown and unnamed. Plankton have provided fair for poets as well as fish, and more than one bard has observed them with pen and hand. The amphonyma is born to squirm each time he eats a larval worm. In order to digest it well, he jerks with joy his little bell. Where the

plankton drift in great clouds near the ocean surface, fish gather. These plankton eaters, ranging up to a foot in size, the herring, manhaden, and anchovies by congregate by the hundreds of millions. While the smaller fish feed on the plankton, the larger fish gather to feed on them, and in turn are themselves fed upon by still larger fish. With the arrival of these larger predators, the pyramid of life reaches its apex.

In the sea the shark is king, without an enemy except for man. No creature is more voracious. Sharks have eaten everything from man and his beer cans to shark repellent and a crazed elephant that once ran into the sea. Bicycles, caracene lamps, tires, ores, and propellers have been found in their stomachs. To discourage sharks, men have tried many methods, from punching them in the nose to casting bread on the waters. Both bread and hand have been lost that way. Sharks

are as unpredictable as they are ferocious, and they may allow smaller fish to swim safely in their midst one moment, only to devour them the next. Sharks may reach a length of 50 feet, equipped with a sense of smell that can track a cent a quarter of a mile away, and an ability to produce, use, and shed some 24 ,000 teeth in a decade. Sharks are magnificently adapted to survive in almost every area of the sea. When they attack, they circle their victim in increasingly tighter circles, and then charge with a lunge. In some ways, sharks

are among the most primitive beings in the ocean, for 350 million years they have glided down the sea of evolution scarcely changing, though surrounded by great change. The voracious appetite of the shark has long been a symbol for man, of the fierce struggle for survival that takes place in the sea. This struggle, and the terror it inspired in man, was perhaps the reason that man's imagination has long populated the sea with monsters. Perhaps medieval man best represented this fear with his vision of sea monsters lurking off shore, waiting to seize unsuspecting ships and sailors. One creature has been called monster through the centuries is the octopus. The most maligned creature in the sea.

Superstitious sailors told tales of ships and crew being engulfed in their tentacles and sucked into their mouths, but the worst indignity the octopus has suffered was at the Panavictor Hugo who wrote, The tiger can only devour you, the devil fish in hails you, bound and helpless you find yourself emptied into the sack that is a monster, to be eaten alive is terrible, to be drunk alive is inexpressible. Instead of an offensive monster, the octopus is in reality the sea's master of defense and an expert at survival. It can propel itself through the water with jet -like speed when pursued by such arch enemies as a six foot more a eel.

When trapped, the octopus relies on camouflage and can match itself to any background in the sea. But if the eel's eyesight is poor, its sense of smell isn't, and the octopus must continually play a game of naïcim naïdom. When the eel catches the octopus's scent, he also catches the octopus. The last line of defense for an octopus is his ink. Some scientists claim he hides behind it like a smoke screen or uses it to blind his enemies. Others hold

that the ink is a projection of a dummy octopus, which the real one hopes will confuse his pursuer while he slips away. Some eels don't hold at these theories, however, even if some octopus I do. And it may take several squirtings before the octopus produces either a smoke screen or enough dummies to slip away. In order to survive, animals have employed almost every conceivable type of defense. For some creatures, the best defense is a good offense. Others, such as sharks and rays, hide on the bottom to make themselves

inconspicuous. The ray carries a stinger in his tail. The spiny boxfish has its spines. The porcupine fish puffs itself up into an indigestible ball of quilts. The tiny turkey fish carries venomous stingers on its back. Some creatures use color as camouflage. One way of finding protection is to find someone to protect you. The gnomeus stays close to the jellyfish, and the theory that anything that gets close enough to eat it will be eaten by the jellyfish. The same holds true for the clownfish, which beds down among the stinging tentacles of the sea anemone, possibly luring other fish into a trap. Each anemone knows its own clownfish, and will eat strangers of the same species that wander in.

Shells are an effective mode of defense for creatures that grow them, and for some that do not. The snail, like most mollusks, grows its own. The hermit crab, unlike most crustaceans, grows an inadequate one. He must borrow a snail's shell to protect himself, and find a new one each time he outgrows the present one. Crustaceans usually have a rough time of it, for almost everyone in and out of the sea likes lobster, crab, and shrimp. To protect themselves, lobsters develop shells. The only difficulty is that the lobster grows, but the shell doesn't. Periodically, the lobster must shed the whole

shell to gain some living room. Once the lobster has shed his shell, he's extremely vulnerable. The new shell, which has been growing under the old, will take several hours to harden. There are perhaps as many

beings in the sea as stars in our universe. One key to survival lies in these multitudes, for it is through reproduction that most species survive. The number of eggs laid by fish varies from species to species. The more vulnerable a creature is, the more eggs it will lay, and the more offspring will be born. Most fish leave their eggs to the mercy of the sea. Some species guard their eggs. The tiny male seahorse carries them in his belly, where the female deposits them. The goby stands watch over her eggs. Inside the translucent egg, a simple fertilized cell eventually grows into a complex,

thinned, guild -breathing vertebrae. The fish. As the embryo develops, it draws sustenance from the yolk, until it is ready to feed in the plankton world. Incubation may

last for hours, days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the species. And one fine day, spring perhaps, the sea abounds with birth. In the sea, birth quickly ends in death.

Most infant creatures will become food for other creatures. Yet, if the overall odds of survival are high, there are more than a million to one, enough one survive to preserve the species. In the sea, there are more than a million to one, In the sea, there are more than a million to one,

enough one survive to preserve the species. Thank you.