As the animal lives in the open sea, and probably wants a place of rest, I suppose this beautiful and most anomalous structure is adapted to take hold of floating marine animals.
In deep water, far from the land, the number of living creatures is extremely small: south of the latitude 35 degrees, I never succeeded in catching anything besides some beroe, and a few species of minute entomostracous crustacea.

In shoaler water, at the distance of a few miles from the coast, very many kinds of crustacea and some other animals are numerous, but only during the night.

Between latitudes 56 and 57 degrees south of Cape Horn, the net was put astern several times; it never, however, brought up anything besides a few of two extremely minute species of Entomostraca.

Yet whales and seals, petrels and albatross, are exceedingly abundant throughout this part of the ocean.

It has always been a mystery to me on what the albatross, which lives far from the shore, can subsist; I presume that, like the condor, it is able to fast long; and that one good feast on the carcass of a putrid whale lasts for a long time.