302 BULLETIN or THE BUKEAU OF FISHEEIES 



the longest. The fins can not be depressed, as in most bony fishes, but the sunfish 

 sculls itself along by waving them from side to side. The caudal fin extends around 

 the whole posterior naai^in of the body. In the young it is confluent with the 

 dorsal and anal fins and is hardly separated from them in the adult — so short and 

 with its rays so hidden by the thick opaque skin that it looks more like a dermal 

 fold than a typical fin. Its general outline is rounded, paralleling the rear outline 

 of the body, but its margin is scalloped in the line of each ray (11 to 14) by a 

 rounded bony thickening in a notch. We have counted 11 such notches in a fish 

 3}/2 feet long. The pectoral fin is small, rounded, and situated about halfway up 

 the body immediately behind the tiny gUl opening. There are no rentrals. The 

 skin is unusually thick (about 1 J^ inches in one 47 inches long which we harpooned 

 near La Have Bank on August 7, 1914), very tough and elastic in texture, and 

 crisscrossed with low ridges, while fins as well as trunk are clothed with small bony 

 tubercles, giving the appearance of shark skin. 



The sunfish is described as glowing phosphoresceitt at night in the water. 

 This, however, we can not verify first hand, but we can bear witness that it grunts 

 or groans when hauled out of the water, that its skin is covered with a thick layer 

 of tough slime, and that it is the host of a great variety of parasites, external and 

 internal, with copepods and trematodes clinging to its skin and infesting its gills, 

 its muscles harboring round worms and its intestines various round and flat worms. 



Color. — Dark gray above, the back with a brownish cast, the sides paler with 

 silvery reflections, the belly dusky to dirty white. Some descriptions mention a 

 broad blackish bar along the bases of the unpaired fins, but nothing of the sort was 

 to be seen in the only example we have handled fresh from the water. 



Size. — The sunfish grows to a great size. Heilner^' describes the capture of one 

 10 feet 11 inches long off Avalon (California), while Jordan and Evermann record 

 another Californian specimen 8 feet 2 inches in length, weighing about 1,800 pounds. 

 One measming 8 feet in length and 11 feet from tip to tip was exhibited in London 

 in 1883,^' and an 8-foot specimen was taken off Cape Lookout (North Carolina) in 

 1904,^° but such monsters as this are quite exceptional, the general run being from 

 3 to 5 feet (very rarely 6 feet) long and 175 to 500 pounds in weight. A fish 4}/^ 

 feet long is about 31 inches across the body and 6J^ feet from the tip of the dorsal 

 fin to the tip of the anal. A fish 4 feet 1 inch long, caught off Boston Harbor on 

 August 14, 1922, scaled 516 pounds.*"" 



General range. — Oceanic and cosmopolitan in tropical and temperate seas; 

 known northward to northern Norway on the European side of the Atlantic, to 

 the Newfoundland banks and outer coast of Nova Scotia on the American side, and 

 recorded from the Gulf of St. Lawrence as well. 



Occurrence in the Gulf of Maine. — The sunfish is only a casual visitor to the 

 Gulf, which it enters now and then from the warmer and more congenial waters 

 outside the continental slope. Every year odd sunfish are reported here or there 



" Bulletin, New York Zoological Society, Vol. XXIII, No. 6, November, 1920, p. 126. 

 '» Smitt. Scandinavian Fishes. 1892, p. 626. 



» Smith. North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey, Vol. II, 1907. Raleigh. 

 ™ Reported, with photograph, in the Boston Daily Post for Aug. 14, 1922. 



