160 Madras fisheries bulletin vol. xii, 



Before the eggs begin to hatch the pit is made ready. The 

 female is then seen anxiously watching the hatching eggs and 

 incessantly fanning them. The hatching takes place on the 

 fourth or fifth day after spawning. The newly hatched larva? 

 attach themselves for a time to the egg membrane whence they 

 are picked up by the mother in her mouth and transferred to the 

 pit. As the hatching proceeds vigorously she carries large 

 numbers at a time. The male also helps her occasionally, but 

 his attention is given chiefly to the larvae deposited in the pit. The 

 time taken for the hatching of the whole brood is never more 

 than twenty minutes. When all the young ones have been 

 transferred to the pit, the female keeps close watch over them 

 and drives away intruders. The male remains by her side and 

 occasionally relieves her for feeding. A constant current is 

 produced near the pit by the active fanning with the fins of the 

 attendant parent and by the incessant vibration of the tails of 

 the larvae within the pit. The caretaker often examines the larvae 

 by poking its nose into the pit and carefully removes all foreign 

 particles entering it. The young ones are transferred from one 

 pit to another at least once a day. 



The habit of these fish in taking the young into the mouth and 

 carrying them from one nest to the other, is very interesting in view 

 of a similar habit of buccal incubation observed in some of the 

 African and American Cichlids. To my surprise, I found one day 

 the pit from which I took some larvae for observation some hours 

 previously, was deserted by the guardian fish, which was found 

 guarding another new pit some feet away from the old one. I 

 examined the new pit and the larvae were found not to have grown 

 to the free-swimming stage. This induced me to try the experi- 

 ment of removing some larvae from the pit by means of a glass tube 

 and dropping them outside. The guarding parent immediately 

 picked them up carefully and deposited them again in the pit. 

 This conclusively proved that it was the parent fish which trans- 

 ferred the young ones to the new pit. Later I had occasion several 

 times to observe the spawning and hatching of the eggs and the 

 transference of the larvae from the egg membrane to the pit and 

 also from one pit to another. In Etroplus maculatus also the same 

 habit was observed several times. 



