for they have yet to learn the first principles of fishiness. A fish
is a creature whose arms and legs are developed as fins, having
cartilaginous rays spreading out fanlike to form an oar for swimming.
But the lamprey has no trace of arm or leg, not even a bone or
cartilage hidden under the skin. And its ancestors never had any limbs
at all, for the earliest lamprey embryo shows no traces of them. If
the ancestors ever had limbs, the descendants would never quite forget
it. Some little trace would be kept by the clinging force of heredity,
and at some time or another this rudiment would appear. And the lower
jaw they lack too, for that is really another pair of limbs joined
together in front--as it were, a pair of short hands clasped together
and never unlocked.
But though the lampreys have no limbs and no jaws and are not fishes
anyhow, they do not know the difference, and come up the brook in the
spring, rushing up the rapids, swirling about in the eddies, just as
if they were real fishes and owned the brook themselves. They are
long, slender, and slippery, shaped like eels, without any scales and
with only a little fin, and that along the back and tail, an outgrowth
from the vertebral column. The vertebral column itself is limp and
soft, the vertebræ only imperfectly formed and made of soft cartilage.
In front the lamprey seems to be cut off short, but if we look
carefully we see that the body ends in a round disk of a mouth, and
that this disk is beset by rows of sharp teeth. A row of the sharpest
of these is placed on the tongue, and two of these are above the
gullet, for the tongue to scrape against them. And the rest are all
blunt and are scattered over the surface of the mouth, which has no
lips nor jaws, but is surrounded by a belt of fringes. When the
lamprey is hungry he puts his mouth against the side of some fish,
exhausts the water between, and then the pressure of the outside water
holds him there tightly. When this is done, the fish swims away and
the lamprey rides with it, giving no thought to where he is going, but
all the while scraping away the flesh with his rasplike teeth. When he
has filed off enough fish flesh to satisfy his hunger he lets go, and
goes off about his business. The fish, who does not know what hurt
him, goes off to get well if he can. Usually he can not, for the water
of the brook is full of the germs of little toadstool-like plants, and
these fasten themselves on the fish's wounds and make them bigger and
bigger, until at last the cavity of the abdomen is pierced and little
creatures of many kinds, plant and animal, go in there and plunder all
this fish's internal organs, to carry them away for their own
purposes.
But when the lampreys come up the April brook it is not to feed on
fishes, nor is it to feed at all. Nature is insistent that the race
should be kept up, and every animal is compelled to attend to the
needs of the species, even though it be at the sacrifice of all else.
If she were not so, the earth and the seas would be depopulated, and
this is a contingency toward which Nature has never looked.
The lampreys come up the stream to spawn, and while on this errand
they fasten their round mouths to stones or clods of earth, that the
current may not sweep them away. When so fastened they look like some
strange dark plant clinging to the bottom of the brook. When the
spawning season is over some of them still remain there, forgotten by
Nature, who is now busied with other things, and they wear their lives
away still clinging--a strange, weird piece of brook-bottom scenery
which touched the fancy of Thoreau.
When the young are hatched they are transparent as jelly, blind and
toothless, with a mouth that seems only a slit down the front end of
the body. These little creatures slip down the brook unobserved, and
hide themselves in the grass and lily pads till their teeth are grown
and they go about rasping the bodies of their betters, grieving the
fishes who do not know how to protect themselves.
The lamprey is not a fish at all, only a wicked imitation of one which
can deceive nobody. But there are fishes which are unquestionably
fish--fish from gills to tail, from head to fin, and of these the
little sunfish may stand first. He comes up the brook in the spring,
fresh as "coin just from the mint," finny arms and legs wide spread,
his gills moving, his mouth opening and shutting rhythmically, his
tail wide spread, and ready for any sudden motion for which his
erratic little brain may give the order. The scales of the sunfish
shine with all sorts of scarlet, blue, green, purple, and golden
colors. There is a black spot on his head which looks like an ear, and
sometimes grows out in a long black flap, which makes the imitation
still closer. There are many species of the sunfish, and there may be
a half dozen of them in the same brook, but that makes no difference;
for our purposes they are all as one. They lie poised in the water,
with all fins spread, strutting like turkey-cocks, snapping at worms
and little crustaceans and insects whose only business in the brook is
that the fishes may eat them. When the time comes, the sunfish makes
its nest in the fine gravel, building it with some care--for a fish.
When the female has laid her eggs the male stands guard till the eggs
are hatched. His sharp teeth and snappish ways, and the bigness of his
appearance when the fins are all displayed, keep the little fishes
away. Sometimes, in his zeal, he snaps at a hook baited with a worm.
He then makes a fierce fight, and the boy who holds the rod is sure
that he has a real fish this time. But when the sunfish is out of the
water, strung on a willow rod, and dried in the sun, the boy sees that
a very little fish can make a good deal of a fuss.
When the sunfish goes, then the catfish will follow--"a reckless,
bullying set of rangers, with ever a lance at rest." The catfish
belongs to an ancient type not yet fully made into a fish, and hence
those whose paired fins are all properly fastened to the head, as his
are not, hold him in well-merited scorn. He has no scales and no
bright colors. His fins are small, and his head and mouth are large.
Around his mouth are eight long "smellers," fleshy feelers, that he
pushes out as he crawls along the bottom in search of anything that he
may eat. As he may eat anything, he always finds it. His appetite is
as impartial as that of a goat. Anything from a dead lamprey or a
bunch of sunfish eggs to a piece of tomato can is grateful to him. In
each of the fins which represent his arms is a long, sharp bone with a
slimy surface and a serrated edge. These are fastened by a
ball-and-socket joint, and whenever the fish is alarmed the bone is
whirled over and set in place; then it sticks out stiffly on each
side. There is another such bone in the fin on the back, and when all
of these are set there is no fish that can swallow him. When he takes
the hook, which he surely will do if there is any hook to be taken, he
will swallow it greedily. As he is drawn out of the water he sets his
three spines, and laughs to himself as the boy pricks his fingers
trying to get the hook from his stomach. This the boy is sure to do,
and because the boy of the Mississippi Valley is always fishing for
catfish is the reason why his fingers are always sore. The catfish is
careless of the present, and sure of the future. After he is strung on
a birch branch and dried in the sun and sprinkled with dust and has
had his stomach dug out to recover the hook, if he falls into the
brook he will swim away. He holds no malice, and is ready to bite
again at the first thing in sight.
The catfish uses his lungs as an organ of hearing. The needless lung
becomes a closed sac filled with air, and commonly known as the swim
bladder. In the catfish (as in the suckers, chubs, and most brook
fishes) the air bladder is large, and is connected by a slender tube,
the remains of the trachea, to the oesophagus. At its front it fits
closely to the vertebral column. The anterior vertebræ are much
enlarged, twisted together, and through them passes a chain of bones
which connect with the hidden cavity of the air. The air bladder
therefore assists the ear of the catfish as the tympanum and its bones
assist the ear of the higher animals. An ear of this sort can carry
little range of variety in sound. It probably gives only the
impression of jars or disturbances in the water.
The catfish lays her eggs on the bottom of the brook, without much
care as to their location. She is not, however, indifferent to their
fate, for when the little fishes are hatched she swims with them into
shallow waters, brooding over them and watching them much as a hen
does with her chickens. In shallow ponds the young catfishes make a
black cloud along the shores, and the other fishes let them alone, for
their spines are sharp as needles.
Up the brooks in the spring come the suckers, large and small--coarse,
harmless, stupid fishes, who have only two instincts, the one to press
to the head of the stream to lay their eggs, the other to nose over
the bottom of the stream wherever they go, sucking into their
puckered, toothless mouths every organic thing, from water moss to
carrion, which they may happen to find. They have no other habits to
speak of, and when they have laid their eggs in a sandy ripple they
care no more for them, but let go of life's activity and drop down the
current to the river whence they came. There are black suckers and
white suckers, yellow ones, brown ones, and mottled, and there is more
than one kind in every little brook, but one and all they are harmless
dolts, the prey of all larger fishes, and so full of bones that even
the small boy spits them out after he has cooked them.
Then come the minnows, of all forms and sizes, the female dull colored
and practical, laying her eggs automatically when she finds quiet
water, and thinking no more of them afterward. The male, feeble of
muscle, but resplendent in color, with head and fins painted scarlet
or purple, or silver white, or inky black, as may be most pleasing to
his spouse. His mouth is small and without teeth, for he feeds on
creatures smaller than fishes, and his head in the spring is covered
with coarse warts, nuptial ornaments, which fall off as soon as the
eggs are properly disposed of. In the little brook which comes to my
mind as I write two kinds of minnows come up the stream together
before the others realize that it is verily spring. The one is small,
dainty, translucent, and active, swimming free in the water near the
surface and able to take care of itself when pursued by a sunfish or
bass. Along the side of its body are two black stripes not quite
parallel, and between and below them the silvery scales are flushed
with fiery scarlet. The fins are all yellow, with scarlet at base, and
as the male passes and repasses before the female all these colors,
which she has not, grow brighter than ever.
The next is a larger fish, clumsy in form, hugging the bottom as he
swims. The whole body of the male is covered with coarse white warts,
and across each fin is a bar of black, white, and orange. This minnow
feeds on mud, or rather on the little plants which grow in mud, and
his intestines are lengthened out proportionally. In fact, they are so
long that, to find room for them, they are wound spool-fashion about
the air bladder in a way which happens to no other animal.
Of the other minnows, the one attracts his female by a big, jet-black
head; another by the painted fins, which shine like white satin;
another by his deep-blue sheen, which is washed all over with crimson.
In fact, every conceivable arrangement of bright colors can be found,
if we go the country over, as the adornment of some minnow when he
mates in the spring. The only exception is green, for to the fishes,
as to the birds, green is not a color. It only serves to cover one,
while the purpose of real color is to be seen.
And there are fishes whose colors are so placed that they are hidden
from above or below, but seen of their own kind which looks on them
from the side.
The brightest fishes in the world, the "Johnny darters," are in our
little brook. But if you look at them from above you will hardly see
them, for they are dull olive on the back, with dark spots and dashes
like the weeds under which they lie. The male is only a little fellow,
not so long as your finger and slim for his size. He lies flat on the
bottom, half hidden by a stone, around which his tail is twisted. He
will stay there for hours, unseen by other fishes, except by his own
kinsmen. But if you reach down to touch him with your finger he is no
longer there. The tail straightens out, there is a flash of blue and
scarlet, and a foot or two away he is resting quietly as before. On
the bottom is his place, and he seems always at peace, but when he
moves his actions are instantaneous and as swift as possible to a
creature who lives in the water. On the bottom, among the stones, the
female casts her spawn. Neither she nor the male pays any further
attention to it, but in the breeding season the male is painted in
colors as beautiful as those of the wood warblers. When you go to the
brook in the spring you will find him there, and if you catch him and
turn him over on his side you will see the colors that he shows to his
mate, and which her choice through ages has tended to develop in him.
But do not hurt him. He can only breathe for a moment out of water.
Put him back in the brook and let him paint its bottom the colors of a
rainbow, a sunset, or a garden of roses. All that can be done with
blue, crimson, and green pigments in fish ornamentation you will find
in some brook in which the darters live. It is in the limestone brooks
that flow into the Tennessee and Cumberland where they are found at
their brightest, but the Ozark region comes in for a close second.
There will be sticklebacks in your brook, but the other fishes do not
like them, for they are tough and dry of flesh, and their sharp spines
make them hard to swallow and harder still to digest. They hide
beneath the overhanging tufts of grass, and dart out swiftly at
whatever passes by. They tear the fins of the minnows, rob the nests
of the sunfish, drag out the eggs of the suckers, and are busy from
morn to night at whatever mischief is possible in the brook.
The male dresses in jet-black when the breeding season is on,
sometimes with a further ornament of copper-red or of scarlet. The
sticklebacks build nests in which to hide their eggs, and over these
the male stands guard, defending them with courage which would be
dauntless in any animal more than two inches long. Very often he has
to repel the attacks of the female herself, who, being relieved of all
responsibility for her offspring, is prone to turn cannibal. Even the
little dwellers of the brook have their own troubles and adversities
and perversities.
Last of all comes the blob, or miller's thumb, who hides in darkness
and picks up all that there is left. He is scaleless and slippery,
large of head, plump of body, and with no end of appetite. He lurks
under stones when the water is cold. He is gray and greenish, like the
bottom in color. He robs the buried nests of eggs, swallows the young
fishes, devours the dead ones, and checks the undue increase of all,
not forgetting his own kind. When he has done his work and the fall
has come and gone, and the winter and the spring return, the brook
once more fills with fishes, and there are the same kinds, with the
same actions, the same ways, and the same numbers, and one might think
from year to year, as the sun is said to do, that these were the
selfsame waters and the selfsame fishes mating over and over again and
feeding on the selfsame food.
But this is not so. The old stage remains, or seems to remain, but
every year come new actors, and the lines which they repeat were
"written for them centuries before they were born." But each
generation which passes changes their lives just a little, just as the
brook and the meadow itself is changing.
WHITE WHALES IN CONFINEMENT.
BY FRED MATHER.
The dolphin family (_Delphinidæ_) contains nine genera, with only one
species in each, but the most interesting one is the white whale
(_Delphinapterus leucas_ of Pallas, or _D. catodon_ [Linn.] of Gill),
because it is the only one that can be kept in confinement and its
habits observed under semi-domestication. It has fallen to my lot to
care for several of these animals in confinement, and to have a chance
to note their peculiarities.
"The Great New York Aquarium," at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street,
New York city, was built by Messrs. Coup and Reiche, and opened in
1876. Mr. Butler was the superintendent. I supervised fish culture,
and when not otherwise engaged made collections of fishes and
invertebrates in Bermuda and in other parts. In 1877 I had charge of
their branch aquarium at Coney Island. At both places we had many
white whales at different times, for the management would keep whales
penned up on the St. Lawrence River to replace those which died, and
would never show more than two at a time, claiming that they were rare
animals and only to be had at "enormous" expense. The aquarium was a
private concern; admission fifty cents; and as the owners were W. C.
Coup, a former circus proprietor and once the business manager of
Barnum's Circus, and Henry Reiche, an animal dealer, who would sell
you giraffes, elephants, or white mice, the attractions were duly
exaggerated by the press agent, no matter what the facts might be.
This is why we kept a reserve stock of white whales. It would never do
to have the public know that they were common during the summer in the
St. Lawrence, and when one was getting weak another would be sent
down, and the public supposed that the same pair was on exhibition all
the time.
This species is common in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and
Arctic Oceans. According to the late Prof. G. Brown Goode, "stragglers
have been seen in the Frith of Forth, latitude 56°, while on the
American coast several have been taken within the past decade [1880]
on the north shore of Cape Cod. They are slightly abundant in New
England waters, but in the St. Lawrence River and on the coast of
Labrador are plentiful, and the object of a profitable fishery. They
abound in the Bering and Okhotsk Seas, and ascend the Yukon River,
Alaska, to a distance of seven hundred miles. The names in use are
beluga and whitefish among whalers, porpoise, dauphin blanc, marsouin
or marsoon in Canada, and keela luak with the Greenland Eskimos"
(Fisheries Industries).
The white whale grows to be sixteen feet long; we never had one over
ten feet in length, but they were billed, showman fashion, to be much
longer. An adult will yield from eighty to one hundred gallons of good
whale oil, besides several gallons of more valuable oil from the head
which is used on clocks and watches under the trade name of
"porpoise-jaw oil," which is sent in a crude state to manufacturers on
Cape Cod, who refine it and free it from all tendency to gum. The
skins make a leather that is waterproof and stands more hard service
than any other known leather. Large quantities of it are sent to
England and made into "porpoise-hide boots" for sportsmen, and in
Canada the hides are converted into mail bags. The flesh is eaten to
some extent by the fishermen, fresh, salted, and smoked.
Zach. Coup said: "I have eaten the fresh steaks several times, and
found the meat a fair substitute for beef when the choice was between
fish and bacon as a continuous diet, down on the islands where these
three things were the only possible variation in the line of animal
food, and a very limited choice in the vegetable line, comprising
dried beans and rice, for when I was with them there was a scarcity of
potatoes for seed, and canned goods had not attained their present
popularity, even if these poor fishermen had been able to buy them."
The fat, oily blubber is an overcoat, a nonconductor of heat, and is
between the muscle and the skin, as is largely the case with the hog,
and, like the latter animal, there is savory muscle which may be cut
into succulent steaks below it.
At first the white whales were not in my care, but, being strange
animals, were watched with curiosity. The whale tank was as nearly
circular as a twenty-sided tank could be whose glass plates were four
feet wide with iron standards between, making a pool of about thirty
feet in diameter. The pool was of cement and tapered down to an outlet
about three feet below the floor, for drainage, and on the floor the
cement basin arose two and a half feet, while the panes of one-inch
glass were six feet high, with the water line two feet below the top
of the glass. This gave the spectators a view of the animals below
water, and of their backs as they came up to blow. The white whale and
the harbor porpoise (_Phocæna brachycion_), known as the herring-hog,
etc., do not make as much of a "spout" as the larger whales do; they
roll up and exhale either less strongly or with less water over the
blow-hole than their larger relatives. They merely send a mist into
the air which can not be seen at a distance of a thousand yards, while
the "blowing" of the larger whales may be seen for miles. Half a
century ago we boys were taught by the text-books that the
whale--there was only one mentioned--drew in water through its mouth,
strained out the jellyfishes and other life, and then ejected the
water, after the manner of a fire engine, through the top of its head.
That this nostril, equipped with the best water-tight valve ever
invented, enabled an air-breathing mammal to exhale and inhale,
without getting much water into its lungs, we never suspected. If we
thought about it at all we looked at the whale as a fish, having gills
somewhere, and let it go at that. As our laws speak of "whale
fisheries" and "seal fisheries" in connection with these great aquatic
mammals, it would be just as correct to speak of all animals which
frequent the water as "fishes," and legislate on the "muskrat
fisheries," "mink fisheries," etc.; there is really no difference.
I have seen newspaper reports that about thirty years ago a white
whale, brought there by a Mr. Cutting, lived in captivity in Boston
for two years. Beyond the fact that one was brought there by a Mr.
Cutting, and was on exhibition about that time, is all that I have
been able to learn, and it is doubtful if it lived one year (see
Fisheries Industries, section 1, page 19). One was exhibited at
Barnum's old museum, at Broadway and Ann Street, New York, that is
said to have lived nine months and was then burned up when that
building burned, in March, 1868. As these animals only come into the
St. Lawrence, where all live ones have been captured, in May and June,
there is no reason to doubt that it did live in confinement for nine
months, but none that have been exhibited since that time have
survived more than half as long, and I have had personal knowledge of
every one since Barnum's.
Coup's Broadway Aquarium opened on October 11, 1876--too late to get a
white whale that year. But early next spring Mr. Coup sent his brother
to the St. Lawrence River for specimens. This brother, "Zach.," had
never seen a whale, but he had full instructions concerning their care
from Professor Butler, who had charge of the one at Barnum's Museum.
There was an air of mystery about the expedition, and in May "Zach."
brought a solitary specimen and at once went for more. The town was
billed, the daily press was worked in true circus fashion, the crowd
came and expressed various opinions. Standing by the tank, I heard
strange comments:
"Do you call that little thing a whale?" This to an attendant.
"Yes, sir, it's a white whale from the northern coast of Labrador, the
only one ever captured or ever seen by the oldest whaleman. It was
reported to have been seen near the entrance to Hudson Bay, and Mr.
Coup fitted out an expedition and captured it at an expense of over
one hundred thousand dollars." He had evidently been reading what the
press agent had stuffed into the newspapers.
The visitor took another look and remarked: "The papers said it was
twenty feet long; I should think it might be six feet, but no more."
"Well," answered the attendant, "water is mitey deceivin', an' that
whale is more'n three times as long as it looks. The fact is, the
papers did report it to be longer than it is, for when we drew off the
water to clean the tank yesterday we put a steel tape over the whale
and it measured just nineteen feet eleven inches and a half."