Dead worms simply wouldn't do. They had to be alive and healthy or the electric rays couldn't find them. Nothing else we put into the tank would tempt them, neither chopped shrimp, fish, clam, nor any other morsel-not even live minnows or amphipods. They ignored our offerings and grew thinner, weaker, and more emaciated. And when they finally died of starvation, because we couldn't get enough worms, their normally folded back mouths protruded, a final recrimination that we let them starve.

Wisps of fog were moving over the flat, driven by a gentle south wind. I needed a bone-chilling north wind that would have pushed the water off the tideflats, keeping them exposed for hours so I could cover more ground and dig more worms. But tonight the winds were variable, able to turn any moment and push the water back in. In the fall of the year, when warm air blows across a cool sea, there can be sudden fog, and being caught in it out there on the flat can be an uncomfortable situation at best.

When we first got the contract to supply routine shipments of live, healthy electric rays I was confident we could handle it. After all, Gulf Specimen Company already sold worms to many zoology classes in the country to demonstrate the phylum Annelida. We knew where to get scaleworms, or dig lugworms out of the marsh, or dive for featherduster worms that lived in tubes in the limestone coral rocks.

But in retrospect, we sold a dozen here and a dozen there. Who would have dreamed that the rays would eat so many? Nights were spent on my "Living Dock," holding a light above the water dip-netting Nereis pelagica. The whirling little dervishes of polychaete worms rise up off the bottom and dance and spin in the water column. But they are tiny, too tiny for the rays to eat. Then we tried feeding them larger worms that lived in fouling communities, tearing up barnacles, oysters, and hydroids and picking out the three-inchers. Our fingers ended up a mass of cuts, stings, and infections. We knew we'd have to find a better way. It was becoming clear that even if we had armies of people roving the flats, it would be a struggle to keep a hundred rays fed. And from their gut contents, we knew they could eat eight to ten small worms at a sitting.

Until we figured out how to grow worms, a subject that Anne was researching, or found a reliable economic supplier of live bait worms, it was back to the mud flats.

If you took Florida's coastline with all its bays, estuaries, meandering creeks, and bayous and stretched it out, there would be roughly eleven thousand miles of tidal lands. And if you took shovels and buckets and screens in hand, and declared war on them, there would no doubt be metric tons of worms living down in the mud that could be caught, but it would require the funding of a public works project. That night I was after plumed worms, Diopatra cuprea and Onuphis magnum, all-purpose worms that are large, easy-to-find, and, once removed from their heavy, shell-covered tubes, readily eaten by electric rays. They make a tube of parchmentlike material by secreting mucus and mixing it with sand. Most of the tube that lies beneath the surface is clean and white, but the section that sits above the substrate like a periscope presents an untidy array of shell and debris stacked one on top of the other. The shells adhere to the tube by a sticky glue secreted by the worm, and added to it is a hodgepodge of dead sea grass, bits of detritus, and anything else the worm can stick on.

The worm peers out of its opening, writhing its tentacles about and picking up bits of plankton and detritus. Its leathery casing and debris afford an excellent fortress, camouflage, and place to hide from the marauding crabs.