INSECTS IN RELATION TO OTHER ANIMALS 281 
also the raccoon, which is to some extent insectivorous. 
Monkeys are omnivorous but devour many kinds of insects. 
With these hasty references, we may pass at once to the 
subject of the insect food of fishes and birds. 
Insects in Relation to Fishes.—Insects constitute the 
most important portion of the food of adult fresh water fishes, 
furnishing forty per cent. of their food, according to Dr. 
Forbes, from whose valuable writings the following extracts 
are taken. 
“The principal insectivorous fishes are the smaller species, 
whose size and food structures, when adult, unfit them for the 
capture of Entomostraca, and yet do not bring them within 
reach of fishes or Mollusca. Some of these fishes have pecu- 
liar habits which render them especially dependent upon insect 
life, the little minnow Phenacobius, for example, which, ac- 
cording to my studies, makes nearly all its food from insects 
(ninety-eight per cent.) found under stones in running water. 
Next are the pirate perch, Aphredoderus (ninety-one per 
cent.), then the darters (eighty-seven per cent.), the croppies 
(seventy-three per cent.), half-grown sheepshead (seventy- 
one per cent.), the shovel fish (fifty-nine per cent.), the chub 
minnow (fifty-six per cent.), the black warrior sunfish (Cheno- 
bryttus) and the brook silversides (each fifty-four per cent.), 
and the rock bass and the cyprinoid genus Notropis (each 
fifty-two per cent.). 
“Those which take few insects or none are mostly the mud- 
feeders and the ichthyophagous species, Amia (the dog-fish) 
being the only exception noted to this general statement. 
Thus we find insects wholly or nearly absent from the adult 
dietary of the burbot, the pike, the gar, the black bass, the wall- 
eyed pike, and the great river catfish, and from that of the 
hickory shad and the mud-eating minnows (the shiner, the fat- 
head, etc.). It is to be noted, however, that the larger fishes 
all go through an insectivorous stage, whether their food 
when adult be almost wholly other fishes, as with the gar and 
the pike, or molluscs, as with the sheepshead. The mud- 
