From: Under the Seawind, by Rachel Carson
...The third hunter was Lophius, the angler fish, a squat, misshapen creature formed
like a bellows, with a wide gash of a mouth set with rows of sharp
teeth. A curious wand grew above the mouth, like a supple fishing rod at
the end of which dangled a lure, or leaflike flap of flesh. Over most of
the angler’s body ragged tatters of skin streamed out into the water,
giving the fish the appearance of a rock grown with seaweeds.
.....
After about the middle of the night there was no more movement in the weed bed
under the prow of the wrecked Mary B., for the angler fish had gone out to forage for
bigger game than the few small fishes that came to investigate its lure.....
....A flock of eiders had come down to rest for the night on the water over
the shoal. They had alighted first two miles to landward, but the sea
ran in broken swells over the rough terrain beneath them and after the
tide turn it foamed on the dark water around the ducks. The wind was
blowing onshore, and it fought the tide.
The ducks were disturbed in their sleep and flew to the outer edge of the shoal,
where the water was quieter, and settled down once more on the seaward
side of the breakers.
The ducks rode low in the water, like laden fishing schooners. Although
they slept, some with their heads under the feathers of their shoulders,
they often had to paddle with their webbed feet to keep their positions
in the swift-running tide.
As the sky began to lighten in the east and the water above the edge of
the shoal grew gray instead of black, the forms of the floating ducks
looked from below like dark oval shadows encased in a silvery sheen of
air imprisoned between their feathers and the surface film. The eiders
were watched from below by a pair of small, malignant eyes that belonged
to a creature swimming slowly and with awkward motion through the
water—a creature like a great, misshapen bellows.
Lophius was well aware that birds were somewhere near, for the scent and
taste of duck were strong in the water that passed over the taste buds
covering his tongue and the sensitive skin within his mouth. Even before
the growing light had brought the surface shadows within his cone-shaped
field of vision, he had seen phosphorescent flashes as the feet of the
ducks stirred the water. Lophius had seen such flashes before, and often
they had meant that birds were resting on the surface.
His night’s prowling had brought him only a few moderate-sized fishes, which
was far from enough to fill a stomach that could hold two dozen large flounders
or threescore herring or could pouch a single fish as large as the angler itself.
Lophius moved closer to the surface, climbing with his fins. He swam
under an eider that was separated a little from its fellows. The duck
was asleep, bill tucked in its feathers, one foot dangling below its
body.
Before it could waken to knowledge of its danger it was seized in
a sharp-toothed mouth with a spread of nearly a foot. In sudden terror
the duck beat the water with its wings and paddled with its free foot,
seeking to take off from the surface. By a great exertion of strength it
began to rise from the water, but the full weight of the angler hung
from its body and dragged it back.
The honking of the doomed eider and the thrashing of its wings alarmed
its companions, and with a wild churning of the water the remainder of
the flock took off in flight, quickly disappearing into the thin mist
that lay over the sea. The duck was bleeding spurts of bright-red blood
from a severed leg artery. As its life ebbed away in the bright stream,
its struggles grew feeble, and the strength of the great fish prevailed.
Lophius pulled the duck under, sinking away from the cloud of reddened
water just as a shark appeared in the dim light, attracted by the scent
of blood. The angler took the duck to the floor of the shoal and
swallowed it whole, for his stomach was capable of enormous distension."
From "Under the Sea Wind, Rachel Carson's first book (1941)
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