146 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



On June 17, 1910, I watched a school of miunows in a 

 nest of this sunfish wliere there were eggs and where my 

 presence kept the sunfish away. The minnows were chiefly 

 Blunt-nosed Minnows with a few Stone-rollers and Eed- 

 f'ms.Notropis umhratilis atripes (Jordan). All seemed to 

 be devouring eggs, but obseiTation sufficiently close to 

 determine this was not possible except in the case of one 

 fish, a Stone-roller, which I saw actually take in eggs. 



There appears to have been very little written on the 

 life-liistory of the Long-eared Sunfish. Jordan ('05, p. 15) 

 gives a brief general account of the nesting behavior of the 

 male, and Henshall ('03 p. 66) notes that its spawning is 

 similar to that of the Bluegill, Lcpomis incisor (Valen- 

 ciennes ) . 



Boleosoma nigrum (Rafinesque), Johnny Darter. 



The breeding habits of this common darter are very sim- 

 ilar to those of the Blunt-nosed Minnow in that the eggs 

 are placed on flat under surfaces of stones (Fig. 6) or 

 other objects, and a parent fish stays by them and protects 

 them. Eggs have been found in both large and small 

 streams, and it is the only darter in this region that fre- 

 quents small creeks to any extent, but it appears to be in 

 these streams in numbers only in the breeding season, so it 

 probably has a breeding migration. I have found eggs in 

 May and June (my dates: May 1 to June 17) in this 

 region. Forbes and Richardson ('09, p. 295) give an 

 earlier season, from the last of April to the first of June. 

 At Walnut Lake, in southern Michigan, nests were found 

 by me from May 16 to June 19 (Hankinson '08, p. 215). 



All of the eggs that I have found in the Charleston 

 region have been in shallow parts of streams with water 

 under a foot in depth and where the current was moderate 

 and the bottom gravelly with a few large stones or other 

 objects for holding them. Four water temperature read- 

 ings have been made close to nests, and these were from 

 66°F. to 77°F. At Walnut Lake, eggs were found under 

 stones on soft white marl bottoms (Hankinson '08, p. 215). 

 Eggs have been found on splinters, a piece of tile, and a 

 mussel shell (1. c). The stones used were all small, none 

 with any diameter greater than ten inches. Beneath all 

 these objects there has been space sufficient to permit a 



