Animal Parasites and Messmates (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos or missing text. Not indexed. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1885. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... some specimens of these pinnotheres in the galleries of the Natural History Museum at Paris. The large mussel, which furnishes fine pearls (Avicula margaritifera), lodges also pinnotheres of a particular species by the side of another messmate more allied to a lobster than a crab. It is not even impossible that these crustaceans, with other messmates or parasites, contribute to the formation of pearls, since these gems, so highly prized in the fashionable world, are only the result of vitiated secretions, and are usually the result of wounds. We also meet with a little crab (Ostracotheres tridacnae, Euppel) in the acephalous mollusc, whose immense shell sometimes serves as a vessel for holy water; and it lives doubtless in many other bivalves which have not yet been examined. Dr. Leon Vaillant has written a very interesting memoir on the Tridacnae, and informs us that the crab takes shelter in their branchial chamber. Therefore, since the molluscs live only on vegetable substances, while the Ostracotheres feed entirely on animal matter, Mons. Vaillant supposes that the latter take their choice of the food as it enters, and seize on its passage that which suits them best. Mr. Peters, during his abode on the coast of Mozambique, studied a great many of these acephala and pearl-mussels, and found their interior inhabited by three crustacean decapods, a pinnothere, and two macrourae allied to the Pontonia, to which he has given the name of Conchodytes; the Conchodytes tridacnm inhabits the Tridacna squamosa; the Conchodytes meleagrinae, as its specific name indicates, lives in the shell of the pearl-mussel. Professor Semper has recently observed pinnotheres in holothurians at the Philippine Isles, and Mons. Alphonse M. Edwards has described some from New Caled...