138 AMERICAN FISHES. 



It is claimed by oyster-planters that the Drum is very destructive to the 

 oyster-beds. Mr. Stearns writes : " Oysters are their favorite food on the 

 Gulf coast, and they destroyed a great many at Apalachicola, St. Andrews, 

 Mobile, and Galveston Bays. The Mobile oyster-planters attribute the 

 bulk of their losses to Drums. At Pensacola I have known a boat-load of 

 oysters, fifty barrels, that were thrown overboard to be preserved, to be 

 entirely consumed in eight or ten days by them, leaving but a heap of 

 broken shells." 



While it is probable that the Drum feeds upon oysters as well as upon 

 crabs or shrimps, it is probable that the extent of their destructiveness has 

 been somewhat exaggerated ; for instance, it was claimed a few years ago 

 that oysters in New York Bay to the value of hundreds of thousands of 

 dollars were destroyed by Drums. This seems quite unlikely, since the 

 Drum is by no means a common fish so far north as New York. 



Concerning its relation to the oyster-culturist, I cannot do better than 

 to quote the words of Mr. Ernest Ingersoll : 



" Knowing the carnivorous propensity of the fish, one can easily imagine 

 how an inroad of such a host must affect an oyster-ground. They do not 

 seem to make any trouble, however, north of New York City, and rarelv 

 along the south side of Long Island. At Staten Island and Keyport they 

 come in every few years and devastate thousands of dollars worth of 

 property. Such a memorable visitation happened about 1850, in July. 

 The following summer the planters in Prince's Bay, fearing a repetition of 

 the onslaught, anchored shingles and pieces of waste tin on their beds, 

 scattering them at short intervals, in the hope that their dancing, glitter- 

 ing surfaces might act as ' scare-crows ' to frighten the fish away. Whether 

 as an effect of this, or because of a general absence, no more Drums ap- 

 peared. In New York Bay, off Caven Point, where the old ' Black Tom 

 Reef is now converted into an island, one planter of Keyport lost his 

 whole summer's work — material and labor — in a single September week, 

 through an attack by Drums. A City Island planter reported to me a loss 

 of $10,000 in one season a few years ago ; but the East River is about the 

 northern limit of the Drums, at least as a nuisance to oyster-culture, so far 

 as I can learn. The vexation of it is, too, that the Drum does not seem 

 to eat half of what he destroys ; but, on the contrary, a great school of 

 them will go over a bed, wantonly crushing hundreds of oysters and drop- 

 ping them untasted, but in fragments, on the bottom." 



The size of the schools in which they go is shown by the following 

 records from contemporary newspapers: "On Monday last, John Earle 

 and sons caught, at one draught, in Bristol Ferry, 719 Drum-fish, weigh- 



