78 American Fisheries Society 



ence to its habits, he says, "It is a carnivorous fish, al- 

 though less greedy than its larger-mouthed relatives. It 

 feeds on insects, crayfishes, worms, and small fishes, and 

 readily takes the hook. It spawns in the spring, but its 

 breeding habits have not been studied." 



More recently, Forbes and Richardson* give its range 

 as "throughout the Mississippi Valley, the Gulf and Great 

 Lakes region, and northward to Ontario and Winnipeg, 

 being especially abundant in the Red River at the latter 

 place. Southward it extends to the Alabama River and 

 the Florida peninsula, Louisiana, Texas, and the Rivers 

 of northern Mexico." The food of 43 specimens exam- 

 ined by them consisted of insects, (larvae and adult) 

 principally aquatic, 44 per cent, vegetable matter, 25 per 

 cent, and Mollusks, 15 per cent. The remainder con- 

 sisted of fishes, animal debris, and stillhouse slops. Most 

 of the aquatic insects were larvae of may-flies, dragon- 

 flies, and gnats, though now and then a fish had fed 

 wholly on terrestrial forms. 



In a letter to Prof. S. F. Baird as published in the Bul- 

 letin of the U. S. Fish Commission for 1884, J. F. Jones 

 of Hogansville, Georgia, writes of his success in raising 

 the "speckled catfish" in a five-acre pond but it is not 

 perfectly clear that he had the channel cat, /. panctatus, 

 in mind, as his fish may have been a species of Ameiurus. 

 In his paper on the "Habits of some of our Commercial 

 Catfishes,"f W. C. Kendall refers to the "speckled cat- 

 fish" of Jones as the channel cat-fish, Ictalurus pimctatus, 

 but one feels some hesitancy in basing the identity on the 

 meager and confusing description of the fish and its hab- 

 its given in Mr. Jones' letter. 



The following account of the spawning of the channel, 

 or spotted catfish, in an aquarium is taken from the Re- 

 port of the Commissioner of Fisheries for 1911. "Dur- 

 ing the summer of 1910 an excellent opportunity was pre- 

 sented of observing the reproductive habits of the spotted 



*Forbcs and Richardson. "The Fishes of Illinois." Natural History 

 Survey of Illinois. Ichthyology, Vol. Ill, 1908. 



fBull. U. S. Bureau of Fisheries, 1902, p. 406. 



