132 W. K. BROOKS. 



subsist almost exclusively upon animals such as molluscs, Crustacea 

 and annelids. 



The seals pursue and destroy fishes ; the sea-elephants and wal- 

 ruses live upon lamellibranchs ; the whales, dolphins and porpoises, 

 and the marine reptiles, all feed upon animals, and most of them 

 are fierce beasts of prey. The manatee is a vegetable feeder, but 

 it is not strictly a marine animal, since its home is in the mouths 

 of great rivers. 



There are a few fishes which pasture in the fringe of seaweed 

 which grows in the littoral zone of the ocean, and there are some 

 which browse among the floating tufts of algae upon its surface, but 

 most of them frequent these places in search of the small animals 

 which live among the plants. All the floating fishes whose home 

 is the floating sargassum ; the file fishes and trigger fishes (Ballistida) ; 

 the trunk fishes (Ostracion) ; the frog fishes (Antennarius) ; and 

 the puffing fishes (Tetradon and Diodou) are carnivorous, living 

 upon the barnacles and molluscs and hydroids which grow upon 

 the sargassum, or upon the Crustacea, young fishes and the floating 

 larvfe which seek its shelter. 



In the Chesapeake Bay, the sheepshead (Diplodus probato- 

 cephalus) browses among the algse upon the submerged rocks and 

 piles like a marine sheep, but its food is exclusively animal, and I 

 have lain upon the edge of a wharf watching it crush the barnacles 

 and young oysters until the juices of their bodies streamed out of 

 the angles of its mouth and gathered a host of small fishes to 

 snatch the fragments as they drifted away with the tide. 



Many important fishes, like the cod, pasture on the bottom, but 

 their pasturage consists of molluscs and annelids and Crustacea, 

 instead of plants. 



The vast majority of marine fishes are fierce hunters, pursuing 

 and destroying smaller fishes, and often exhibiting an insatiable 

 love of slaughter, as in the case of our own blue-fish and the 

 tropical albacore and barracuda. Others, such as the herrings 

 feed u])on smaller fishes and the pelagic pteropods and copepods ; 

 and others, like the shad, upon the minute organisms of the ocean, 

 but all, with few exceptions, are carnivorous. 



In the other great groups of marine animals we find some 

 scavengers, some which feed upon micro-organisms, and others 



