A TARPON NURSERY IN HAITI 



Neither this, nor a later, much more thorough 

 examination showed in these young fish any hint 

 of such phase — even the smallest was as normal 

 and perfectly formed as any six-foot giant of the 

 Florida waters. This may mean only that the 

 leptocephalid characters disappear when the fish 

 are still smaller. 



The second lagoon was absolutely barren of fish 

 life, and a haul made in the shallow gulf water 

 just outside the dyke of the lagoon yielded nothing 

 but thirteen small puffers, Diodon hystrix. 



My next visit to Source Matelas was on January 

 twenty-third. This time there were several 

 hundred wading birds about the lagoons, including 

 willets, greater yellowlegs, herons, stilts and several 

 species of sandpipers. Dr. Jamieson and I made 

 a haul with the seine in the same place and secured 

 a heavy load of tarpon. Tee- Van and Crosby took 

 good still and motion pictures of the process. 

 Wlien we counted our catch on shore, we found one 

 hundred and fifty -four of the young fish, from 

 three to seven inches in length. One individual 

 measured thirteen inches. It was a pure culture 

 of tarpon, except for three small snook, Centropo- 

 mus undecimalis. Several times as many tarpon 

 as we took escaped by leaping over the top of the 

 seine as we were pulling it, some of them rising 

 three feet clear of the surface. We threw back all 

 but the few which we wished to keep as specimens. 



My third visit was two months later, after 

 heavy storms had set in, on the twenty-first of 



69 



