Little Stories of Strange Fishes 325 



sacrificed for the purpose of destroying the enemies of the 

 race. And when men and fishes know how the porcupine 

 fish tastes, they are ready to let it alone. 



A curious defensive habit is possessed by the porcupine 

 fish and its relatives. When caught or even disturbed it 

 will come to the surface and gulp air into its distensible 

 stomach till it has become twice its natural size. It then 

 floats belly upward on the surface, securely protected against 

 any fish, though the small boy can dip it up with his hat. 



And so, floating belly upward, like a great prickly bladder, 

 we will leave it, till it gets over its scare, opens its mouth, 

 lets out the air, lets in the water and swims away. 



Sullen, sluggish and slow, the buffalo sculpin goes nosing 

 about on the bottom of the California bays, snapping up 

 crabs and snails and for the rest filling its stomach with 

 salad ribbons of green seaweed. It is a blundering sort of 

 fish with unsocial disposition, and whenever it is disturbed 

 it shows its wrath by flattening its head and erecting the 

 long spines on its gill covers. When these are set no enemy 

 has a mouth wide enough to swallow it. 



The buffalo sculpin is dull green in color, with darker 

 mottlings. It reaches a length of about fifteen inches. It 

 is always glad of a chance to take a hook, and about Puget 

 Sound, where it is most common, every boy's string is sure 

 to contain at least one of them. 



They are not worth much as food. The flesh is coarse 

 and tough, and when the head and the thick skin are taken 

 off there isn't much left of the fish. 



Like most other sculpins, the buffalo sculpin has no scales, 

 but on its side is a row of bony plates covered by the skin. 

 All sculpins have thorns or spines on the head, and across 

 the cheek is a bone which runs obliquely back from the eye 

 under the skin; all sculpins have this bone and it is their 

 characteristic mark — the thing that makes them sculpins. 

 Of the fishes of this family there are nearly two hundred 

 kinds, and they live in all rivers and seas of the north. The 



