LESSON XXXIV.
A DENIZEN OF THE MARSH LANDS.
“But the cold-blooded snake in the edge of the brakeSits amid the rank grass, half asleep, half awake;And the ashen white snail, with the slime in its trail,Moves wearily on, like a life’s tedious tale.”
“But the cold-blooded snake in the edge of the brakeSits amid the rank grass, half asleep, half awake;And the ashen white snail, with the slime in its trail,Moves wearily on, like a life’s tedious tale.”
“But the cold-blooded snake in the edge of the brakeSits amid the rank grass, half asleep, half awake;And the ashen white snail, with the slime in its trail,Moves wearily on, like a life’s tedious tale.”
“But the cold-blooded snake in the edge of the brake
Sits amid the rank grass, half asleep, half awake;
And the ashen white snail, with the slime in its trail,
Moves wearily on, like a life’s tedious tale.”
—R. S. Nichols.
If the question “What is a siren?” were suddenly put to a class of pupils, I think it probable that the boys would reply, “a steam whistle,” and the girls, “a fabulous monster with a beautiful voice, which she used to lure people to destruction.” Possibly some few observant lads from Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina, might say: “An animal something like a lizard; it lives in the marshes.” The girls would be right, and the boys right, but this last would be the answer wished for in natural history. A siren is an amphibious animal closely allied to the salamanders.
There are four families of amphibians, or batrachians, which are so closely connected that in some of their stages of development they can scarcely be told one from the other.
In these the young of some present almost exactly the adult conditions of the others, and the larvæ of the lower forms have been known to undergo transformations that have changed them from the likeness of their parents to the fashions of the allied species. Thus the adult sirens are scarcely distinguishable from the aquatic larvæ of the salamanders. Siren larvæ have developed into the condition of adultsalamanders, while the young of the salamanders greatly resemble tadpoles, or larval toads and frogs.
The adult menobranch has a skull like that of a tadpole, or a salamander in the larval state. In fact, wherever the young of one of these families diverge from the form of their parents, it is simply to trench upon the form of some of the allied species.
We have noted that frogs and toads have the tongue fastened at the front of the mouth, and hanging free down the throat. Some of the salamanders have the tongue fastened in the middle of the under side, so that it resembles a broad, flat mushroom on a short, thick stem, while the teeth are set in a fine brush above it on the roof of the mouth. In the sirens the tongue is free in front; there are no teeth on the jaws, and the jaws are cased in a horny sheath like a beak; but down the throat there are two patches of sharp little teeth pointed backwards.
Let us take a look at a siren. At first one might call it a fish or an eel, wearing queer plumes at the back of the head, and also endowed with little legs and feet. This is the “lizard-formed siren,” and the largest specimen ever found was about three feet long: most of them do not exceed twenty inches in length. The body is long and slim, like that of an eel; the skin is smooth and nearly black, besprinkled with little white dots. From the shoulders, near the head, come a pair of small, feeble legs, the feet being divided into four fingers. These feet aid the movements of the creature on the sand or mud when it emerges from the water, and serve to elevate the neck a little in catching and swallowing prey.
The motion of the siren in the water is sinuous, like that of an eel; the legs may help a little as paddles, but the action from side to side, such as we have all noticed in a water-snake, is that by which it progresses. Well, let us look, for the hind-legs, now that we have seen the front ones. Where are they? Gone altogether! Nature seems to have concluded that a little beast which would let its front legs dwindle away from want of use, might as well be deprived of the hind ones entirely.
The head of the siren is small; it seems to have as little use for brains as for feet. The snout is short and broad, with the nostrils near the tip; and as for eyes!—they are the tiniest little dots; evidently our siren does not depend much on taking observations of its surroundings. On the other hand the mouth of the creature is disproportionately large, opening across the entire head. The beastie lives to eat, and his mouth is, it seems, his chief organ. This ugly head sits close on an eel-like body which finishes up in a point at the tail, where there is a fin, as a fish has.
The most conspicuous feature of the siren is the appendage placed branch-like on each side of the neck. These appendages have three divisions, each one with a separate attachment, and under each one is a small slit or opening into the siren’s throat. What are these branches waving like plumes? They are external gills, and very pretty they are, the only pretty things about a siren; these gills are of a pale rose-color shaded with gray, and waving and catching the light as the creature swims, they redeem him from absolute ugliness.
I have often wondered why this animal has been named a siren, after the beautiful and fatal creature of fable. Beauty, song, malice; these were the three characteristics of the sirens of which old Homer sung, and not one of these endowments belongs to the siren of the marshes,—ugly, silent, harmless. He is hungry, and he eats, and his food is toads, frogs, insects, any animal organism he can find in the water. He merely opens his mouth and takes his prey in; he neither lulls it nor lures it with music.
A first cousin of this lizard-formed siren, is the striped siren of Georgia. This has only one gill branch, and is distinguished by a broad, yellow band on each side, and a narrower one on the under part of the body. “A mud-eel” it is popularly called. It is very scarce, and valuable accordingly. Few of the museums or zoölogical gardens have specimens of this siren. No doubt ignorant and careless people, finding this odd and helpless creature in its native haunts, ruthlessly kill it, just because they can, and leave to decay specimens which, if taken living, or carefully preserved in alcohol, would have been of great value.
The siren sometimes suffers the loss of its pretty gills in a queer way. Fishes, attracted by their roseate color, nibble them off. In such cases the siren can breathe by coming to the surface of the water, and taking in mouthfuls of air, which it suffers to escape through the slits at the neck. This method of breathing is evidently inconvenient and difficult to the creature, but allows it to maintain life until new gill-branches grow, a process which requires some eight weeks to accomplish.
Some sirens wear a little gold-colored band about the lips and face, which band shines like molten metal in the water, and gives them a gay appearance.
The sirens are quiet and hardy animals, and small ones could be easily kept for pets in a glass aquarium box, if provided with a little mud and sand under the water, and with some stones upon which the creatures could crawl when they wished to be above water. Like all the carnivorous amphibians the sirens will eat bread and milk and raw veal, instead of their usual food.
While chiefly confined to marshy places or still waters of the South, occasional specimens of the siren families have been found as far north as Illinois,[68]and no doubt could live in any locality in the United States, if protected from their enemies. For their own part they are helpless, and fall a prey to whatever attacks them. Their teeth are far down in the throat so they cannot bite; their tails are weak so they cannot strike; they have even no nails on their toes wherewith to scratch. Instead of nails they have a little horny cap on each of the toes, rendering it broader, and so less likely to stick fast in the mud when they crawl out upon a bank.
FOOTNOTES:[68]The menobranchus abounds in all the “five Great Lakes,” especially in Lake Michigan.—O. S. Westcott.
[68]The menobranchus abounds in all the “five Great Lakes,” especially in Lake Michigan.—O. S. Westcott.
[68]The menobranchus abounds in all the “five Great Lakes,” especially in Lake Michigan.—O. S. Westcott.