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!