That is the way the Anemone obtains its food.  As soon as the feelers get hold of a small animal they carry it to the opening of a tube in the centre.  This is the mouth, leading to the stomach.  Very often the feelers, with their victim, are tucked away into the stomach, and the feelers do not appear again for some time.  Is not this a strange way of eating!

Much stranger still is the way in which the food is held, and made so helpless that it cannot escape.  On the skin of the Anemone there are many thousands of very tiny pockets, or cells.  Each cell contains a fine thread with a poisoned barb at the tip, The thread is packed away in the cell, coiled up like the spring of a watch.  As soon as anything presses against the cells they shoot out their threads.  Thus the tips of many poisoned threads enter the skin of any soft animal which is unlucky enough to touch an Anemone.

If your own skin is tender, these little stinging hairs will irritate it, but not enough to hurt you.  It is different, however, with the small creatures of the sea.  They are made quite helpless when caught by hundreds of these strange threads.  We shall find similar poison-threads in the Jelly-fish; and these, in some cases, can cause us serious illness.  You cannot see them without the aid of a microscope.

All those parts of its food which the Anemone cannot digest, it throws out again.  If you feed an Anemone on raw meat, it tucks the pieces into its mouth, and, some days after, throws out the hard part of the meat, having taken all the “goodness” from it.

No doubt the Anemones themselves are eaten by other animals in the sea, but many kinds of fish will not touch them.  You may remember that we noticed an Anemone which lived on the stolen home of the Hermit Crab.  The crab lives in the whelk shell, and the Anemone lives on the roof, as it were.  In nearly every ocean, all over the world, these two partners are found, using the same shell.  It is thought that the Anemone lives there for two good reasons.  First, the Hermit moves from place to place; you can see that this would give the Anemone a better chance of obtaining food.  Also, bits of food float to the Anemone when the crab is picking his dinner to pieces.

The crab seems to like having his strange partner with him.  No doubt the Anemone is of some use to him, or he would at once pull it off.  It is thought that the Anemone protects him from his enemies, the fish.  Some of them would swallow the whelk shell, crab and all, but they would not eat one on which an Anemone was fixed.  We are not sure that these reasons are the right ones.  All we know for certain is, that a crab and an Anemone have, for some good reasons, gone into partnership.

Anemones have large families.  Sometimes they have numbers of eggs; at other times their little ones come straight into the world as very tiny Anemones.  A boy who kept a large Anemone in a tank of sea water, was astonished to find that in a short time, he had not one, but hundreds, of the creatures.  The tiny Anemones were fixed to the glass and rock, all fishing for food with their little outspread tentacles.  Sometimes the Anemone will calmly divide itself into two, each half becoming a perfect Anemone!