4 The Life of the Fish 



nati, among the low wooded hills from which clear brooks flow 

 over gravelly bottoms toward the Ohio River. Here we will catch 

 sunfishes of certain species, or maybe rock bass or catfish: any 

 of these will do for our purpose. But one of our sunfishes is 

 especially beautiful mottled blue and golden and scarlet, with 

 a long, black, ear-like appendage backward from his gill-covers 

 and this one we will keep and hold for our first lesson in fishes. 

 It is a small fish, not longer than your hand most likely, but it 

 can take the bait as savagely as the best, swimming away with 

 it with such force that you might think from the vigor of its 

 pull that you have a pickerel or a bass. But when it comes out 

 of the water you see a little, flapping, unhappy, living plate of 



FIG. 2. Long-eared Sunfish, Lepomis megalotis (Rafinesque). (From Clear Creek, 

 Bloomington, Indiana.) Family Centrarchidw. 



brown and blue and orange, with fins wide -spread and eyes 

 red with rage. 



Form of the Fish. And now we have put the fish into a 

 bucket of water, where it lies close to the bottom. Then we take 

 it home and place it in an aquarium, and for the first time we 

 have a chance to see what it is like. We see that its body is 

 almost elliptical in outline, but with flat sides and shaped on the 

 lower parts very much like a boat. This form we see is such as 

 to enable it to part the water as it swims. We notice that its 

 progress comes through the sculling motion of its broad, flat tail. 



