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Show ! FINDS CORALS K EAT EATERS Geological Surv;y Head Discovers No Veg;iation in Whole Colony In the Tor.U23. The bu'I't-iw of coral reefs end Islands Is-lands are wnlreiy meat-eating animals, according to the report of Dr. !'. Way-land Way-land Vaughan of the United States geological survey to the Pan-Pacific science congress, which recently held its meeting in the Antipodes, says a Melbourne (Australia.) correspondent of the Now York Evening Post. In experiments ex-periments conducted by him in the Tor-tugas, Tor-tugas, in tl;e Gulf of Mexico, corals persistently per-sistently n l used a vegetable diet, but even water fleas were not swift enough to dodge the lightning-like tentacles of these carnivorous creatures. The living coral Is a branched colony col-ony of individuals all connected together, to-gether, and with their soft bodies encased en-cased in strong shells. Each Individual Is little more than a stomach, with a mouth surrounded by tentacles and sheltered in a little cup of the limey skeleton within which the whole colony la Inclosed. Doctor Vaughan described how when a little beef juice or a small bit of meat, usually crab flesh or fish, was offered, the tentacles at the outer edge I of the colony would begin to appear. : Then the stimulus was transmitted to other members of the colony until soon the surface of the specimen had opened out like a beautiful flower. This condition, con-dition, he explains, seems to Indicate that the coral colony Is hungry and ready to capture food. Many different kinds of food were offered corals, Doctor Vaughan said, but they took only animal food. No kind of purely vegetable food was taken by any one of the numerous species investigated. Pieces of plants coated with small animals soaked In meat Juice were swallowed, but later the vegetable matter was ejected. |