The Rotifers Read online

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  THE ROTIFERS

  BY Robert Abernathy

  _Beneath the stagnant water shadowed by water lilies Harry found the fascinating world of the rotifers--but it was their world, and they resented intrusion._

  _Illustrated by Virgil Finlay_

  Henry Chatham knelt by the brink of his garden pond, a glass fish bowlcupped in his thin, nervous hands. Carefully he dipped the bowl into thegreen-scummed water and, moving it gently, let trailing streamers ofsubmerged water weeds drift into it. Then he picked up the old scissorshe had laid on the bank, and clipped the stems of the floating plants,getting as much of them as he could in the container.

  When he righted the bowl and got stiffly to his feet, it contained, hethought hopefully, a fair cross-section of fresh-water plankton. He waspleased with himself for remembering that term from the book he hadstudied assiduously for the last few nights in order to be able to copewith Harry's inevitable questions.

  There was even a shiny black water beetle doing insane circles on thesurface of the water in the fish bowl. At sight of the insect, the eyesof the twelve-year-old boy, who had been standing by in silentexpectation, widened with interest.

  "What's that thing, Dad?" he asked excitedly. "What's that crazy bug?"

  "I don't know its scientific name, I'm afraid," said Henry Chatham. "Butwhen I was a boy we used to call them whirligig beetles."

  "He doesn't seem to think he has enough room in the bowl," said Harrythoughtfully. "Maybe we better put him back in the pond, Dad."

  "I thought you might want to look at him through the microscope," thefather said in some surprise.

  "I think we ought to put him back," insisted Harry. Mr. Chatham held thedripping bowl obligingly. Harry's hand, a thin boy's hand with narrowsensitive fingers, hovered over the water, and when the beetle pausedfor a moment in its gyrations, made a dive for it.

  But the whirligig beetle saw the hand coming, and, quicker than a wink,plunged under the water and scooted rapidly to the very bottom of thebowl.

  Harry's young face was rueful; he wiped his wet hand on his trousers. "Iguess he wants to stay," he supposed.

  The two went up the garden path together and into the house, Mr. Chathambearing the fish bowl before him like a votive offering. Harry's mothermet them at the door, brandishing an old towel.

  "Here," she said firmly, "you wipe that thing off before you bring it inthe house. And don't drip any of that dirty pond water on my goodcarpet."

  "It's not dirty," said Henry Chatham. "It's just full of life, plantsand animals too small for the eye to see. But Harry's going to see themwith his microscope." He accepted the towel and wiped the water andslime from the outside of the bowl; then, in the living-room, he set itbeside an open window, where the life-giving summer sun slanted in andfell on the green plants.

  ----

  The brand-new microscope stood nearby, in a good light. It was anexpensive microscope, no toy for a child, and it magnified four hundreddiameters. Henry Chatham had bought it because he believed that his onlyson showed a desire to peer into the mysteries of smallness, and so farHarry had not disappointed him; he had been ecstatic over theinstrument. Together they had compared hairs from their two heads, hadseen the point of a fine sewing needle made to look like the tip of acrowbar by the lowest power of the microscope, had made grains of saltlook like discarded chunks of glass brick, had captured a house-fly andmarvelled at its clawed hairy feet, its great red faceted eyes, and thedelicate veining and fringing of its wings.

  Harry was staring at the bowl of pond water in a sort of fascination."Are there germs in the water, Dad? Mother says pond water is full ofgerms."

  "I suppose so," answered Mr. Chatham, somewhat embarrassed. The book onmicroscopic fresh-water fauna had been explicit about _Paramecium_ and_Euglena_, diatomes and rhizopods, but it had failed to mention anythingso vulgar as germs. But he supposed that which the book called Protozoa,the one-celled animalcules, were the same as germs.

  He said, "To look at things in water like this, you want to use awell-slide. It tells how to fix one in the instruction book."

  He let Harry find the glass slide with a cup ground into it, and anothersmooth slip of glass to cover it. Then he half-showed, half-told him howto scrape gently along the bottom sides of the drifting leaves, tocapture the teeming life that dwelt there in the slime. When the boyunderstood, his young hands were quickly more skillful than hisfather's; they filled the well with a few drops of water that waspromisingly green and murky.

  Already Harry knew how to adjust the lighting mirror under the stage ofthe microscope and turn the focusing screws. He did so, bent intentlyover the eyepiece, squinting down the polished barrel in the happyexpectation of wonders.

  Henry Chatham's eyes wandered to the fish bowl, where the whirligigbeetle had come to the top again and was describing intricate patternsamong the water plants. He looked back to his son, and saw that Harryhad ceased to turn the screws and instead was just looking--looking witha rapt, delicious fixity. His hands lay loosely clenched on the tabletop, and he hardly seemed to breathe. Only once or twice his lips movedas if to shape an exclamation that was snatched away by some new vision.

  "Have you got it, Harry?" asked his father after two or three minutesduring which the boy did not move.

  Harry took a last long look, then glanced up, blinking slightly.

  "You look, Dad!" he exclaimed warmly. "It's--it's like a garden in thewater, full of funny little people!"

  Mr. Chatham, not reluctantly, bent to gaze into the eyepiece. This wasnew to him too, and instantly he saw the aptness of Harry's simile.There was a garden there, of weird, green, transparent stalks composedof plainly visible cells fastened end to end, with globules and bladderslike fruits or seed-pods attached to them, floating among them; and inthe garden the strange little people swam to and fro, or clung with oddappendages to the stalks and branches. Their bodies were transparentlike the plants, and in them were pulsing hearts and other organsplainly visible. They looked a little like sea horses with pointedtails, but their heads were different, small and rounded, with big,dark, glistening eyes.

  All at once Mr. Chatham realized that Harry was speaking to him, stillin high excitement.

  "What are they, Dad?" he begged to know.

  His father straightened up and shook his head puzzledly. "I don't know,Harry," he answered slowly, casting about in his memory. He seemed toremember a microphotograph of a creature like those in the book he hadstudied, but the name that had gone with it eluded him. He had worked asan accountant for so many years that his memory was all for figures now.

  He bent over once more to immerse his eyes and mind in the greenwater-garden on the slide. The little creatures swam to and fro asbefore, growing hazy and dwindling or swelling as they swam out of thenarrow focus of the lens; he gazed at those who paused in sharpdefinition, and saw that, although he had at first seen no visible meansof propulsion, each creature bore about its head a halo of thread-like,flickering cilia that lashed the water and drew it forward, for all theworld like an airplane propeller or a rapidly turning wheel.

  "I know what they are!" exclaimed Henry Chatham, turning to his son withan almost boyish excitement. "They're rotifers! That means'wheel-bearers', and they were called that because to the firstscientists who saw them it looked like they swam with wheels."

  Harry had got down the book and was leafing through the pages. He lookedup seriously. "Here they are," he said. "Here's a picture that looksalmost like the ones in our pond water."

  "Let's see," said his father. They looked at the pictures anddescriptions of the Rotifera;
there was a good deal of concreteinformation on the habits and physiology of these odd and complex littleanimals who live their swarming lives in the shallow, stagnant waters ofthe Earth. It said that they were much more highly organized thanProtozoa, having a discernible heart, brain, digestive system, andnervous system, and that their reproduction was by means of two sexeslike that of the higher orders. Beyond that, they were a mystery; theirrelationship to other life-forms remained shrouded in doubt.

  "You've got something interesting there," said Henry Chatham withsatisfaction. "Maybe you'll find out something about them that nobodyknows yet."

  He was pleased when Harry spent all the rest of that Sunday afternoonpeering into the microscope, watching the rotifers, and even morepleased when the boy