Creatures of the Deep sea
Many queer creatures some strangely shaped and coloured, others having strange ways of living are found in the mighty oceans; as well as in lakes and rivers.
One of such creatures is what is popularly known as the sea rose. At its upper end there is a ring of feeler’s spread out like the petals of a rose. They are its tentacles. Those brightest of sea flowers are found amid the coral reefs of Australia and Japan.
But the sea-rose is not a gentle one. It has a wide mouth and a hearty appetite and can swallow shrimps and small fish at a gulp. It carries at the tip of each tentacle a poison bag, inside which sharp pointed threads are coiled. When one of the threads is thrust forth it pierces the skin, the poison flows out and its victim is within its power. So, the small creatures of the deep sea keep away from the sea rose.
The octopus is a much more alarming sea creature. It is one of the giants of the deep. He may be as much as forty feet long. He has a soft rubber like body, a sharp nose, big staring eyes and eight long and strong tentacles ringed around his ever hungry mouth.
Neither men nor shell fish care to find themselves within the reach of those eight arms; a double row of suckers by means of which the octopus can take such a firm grip of any creature that it is almost impossible to get free.
The arms of the octopus also serve as legs on which he mambles about the floor of the ocean. if he wishes to go more quickly than his arms can carry him, he has In his body a funnel which he uses as a squirt, the force of the action shooting him backwards at a good force.
Sometimes, he squirts away the sand and makes in the ocean bed a sort of hollow in which he can rest. Then he lies half buried and waits for a crab to come by for a tasty crab is one of his chief delights. The whale is fond of the octopus. He can swallow the whale octopus.
There are fish that have been flying before men learnt flying. They are found on the Coasts of China, Western America, India and in some parts of Pacific Ocean; They swim beneath the waves then fly cutting through the air and again skimming along the surface of the water.
The flying fish folds both pairs of fins against his sides when swimming under water. When it is chased by another fish, it takes off by thrashing the water with its tail which acts as a propeller and shoots up into the air. At once his fore fins are spread out like the wings of a plane and he glides swiftly through the air for several seconds. As soon as it touches water, the propeller begins to work again and he skims along the surface like a sea plane. After he takes off four times before diving below the surface again.
