Endless Ocean

Another Old Excerpt Weapons in Nature Natural Wildlife Ways P2

Vultures use their powerful, hooked beaks for tearing their food into pieces small enough to swallow. They can fight with them, too, if they have to. These huge, homely birds are found in many tropical parts of the world. Their principal food is the flesh of dead animals.

Some of those Jellyfishes which you see along an ocean beach in summer have poisonous streamers which sting anything they touch. This is their way of killing the other much smaller water creatures which are their natural food.
Sometimes these stinging tentacles are useful, too, as protection from their enemies. The name "Jellyfish" comes from the jelly-like stuff which forms their bodies.

Another strange creature with much longer tentacles is called Portuguese Man-of-War. This soft-bodied little fish really does look somewhat like a tiny ship when it floats along on the surface of warm oceans. His tentacles hang quite a distance down into the water. His poison is strong enough to kill any little fish he touches. Then the Man-of-War eats him. The queer weapons of the Man-of-War and the Jellyfish are painful to people, but not really dangerous.

Deeper in the ocean, and usually where there are large rocks which make good hiding places, is the home of the famous Octopus. His eight long, strong tentacles contain no poison. Instead, all along his under side there are many small suction discs which look like small, shallow saucers.
These can get a deadly grip on any creature against which they are pressed. When the Octopus has caught a fish or some other living food with them, his tentacles carry it to his mouth which is near the bottom of the bulb-like body that you see in the photograph.

The Porpoise and The Dolphin, looks somewhat like a fish bur they are warm-blooded mammals that live in the oceans of the world. A big one weighs several hundred pounds and can swim tremendously fast. His weapon is a long snout that is almost as hard as concrete. With this they and their companions can batter a shark so badly that they are able to chew them up with their sharp teeth.

The hundreds of different bees, wasps and hornets use their poisonous, needle-like stingers for defending their tome nests and driving off any creature which bothers them.
Even horses and cows are sometimes attacked so savagely that they run away as fast as they can.
The females of the bee family are the only ones who have stingers. This is because they are the ones who do all the work and are most likely to need weapons. The males are harmless and lazy. This is why they are called "drones".

The Black Widow Spider is poisonous, too, but in a different way. Instead of injecting the poison with a stinger she uses a pair of sharp curved jaws called mandibles. With these she grabs and kills small insects to eat. Sometimes, in self-defense, she will bite a person who she thinks is threatening her life. Her bite may be really serious.
It is important for everyone interested in animals to understand which weapons of wildlife to avoid close contact with. Remember that any creature will defend himself if threatened-and that most of them are really afraid of you.