Little Stories of Strange Fishes 327 



rolling and pitching and splashing, with some monster at- 

 tached to its side. It is commonly believed that it is the 

 thresher shark which is responsible for all this, and one of 

 the current tales in fish mythology is the one that describes 

 the thresher and the swordfish hunting whales together. 

 The thresher is supposed to fasten itself on the whale and 

 flail him to death with his great tail, while the swordfish 

 pricks him with his spear from below. Sometimes in these 

 stories the saw-fish is also introduced — a harmless creature 

 that never ventures out into the open where whales are 

 found. 



In all these stories, there is this much of truth : The great 

 killer, orca, itself a sort of whale, and the most greedy of 

 beasts, attacks its larger brethren, biting out large masses 

 of flesh. Several of them may attack a whale together. 

 The whale rolls over and over, sometimes taking the killers 

 with it through the air. This I have twice seen off the coast 

 of Lower California. It is the killer which is mistaken for 

 the thresher. There is no evidence that the thresher ever 

 attacks whales or man or any large animals. As to the 

 swordfish, I am not so sure, but I doubt if it ever disturbs 

 the whales, and it certainly has no grudge against them. The 

 sawfish kills nothing bigger than a sardine, and while it is 

 unfortunate to spoil a fish story, it is sometimes well to do 

 it in order to tell a better one. 



The hagfish or slime-eel looks very much like a lamprey, 

 which is indeed its nearest neighbor in the system of classi- 

 fication. It is long, slim, cylindrical, worm-shaped, without 

 limbs and without jaws, without eyes and without scales. 

 Its skin is loose, like a scarf, and its surface is covered with 

 slime. The different species live in the cold seas, Arctic 

 and Antarctic, and some of them go down to great depths. 



One species is common along the coast of California and 

 is abundant in Monterey Bay. To this point naturalists 

 from the east and from Europe have sometimes come to the 

 Hopkins Seaside Laboratory of Stanford for the special 



