54 



depended upon by several species, such as the pirate perch, 

 the brook minnow, the top minnows or kiUifishes (Cyprino- 

 donticlse), the toothed herring and several cyprinoids (Semo- 

 tilus, Pimephales, and Notropis). 



Among aquatic insects, minute, slender dipterous larvae are 

 of remarkable importance, making, in fact, nearly one twelfth 

 of the food of all the fishes studied. They amounted to about 

 one third the food in fishes as large and important as the red 

 horse and the river carp, and made nearly one fourth that of 

 fifty-one buffalo fishes. They appear further in considerable 

 quantity in the food of a number of the minnow family (Notropis, 

 Pimephales, etc.), which habitually frequent the swift water of 

 stony streams. Aquatic beetles and larvae, notwithstanding the 

 abundance of some of the forms, occurred in only insignificant 

 ratios, but were taken by fifty-six specimens. The adult sur- 

 face beetles, whose zig-zag darting swarms no one can have 

 failed to notice, were not once encountered in my studies. 



The almost equally well-known slender water-skippers seem 

 also completely protected by their habits and activity from 

 capture by fishes, only one occurring in the food of all our 

 specimens. 



It is from the order Neuroptera that fishes draw a larger part 

 of their food than from any other single insect group. In fact, 

 nearly one sixth of the entire amount of food consumed by all 

 the fishes examined by me consisted of aquatic larvae of this 

 order, the greater part of them larvae of day flies. These 

 Neuroptera larvae were eaten especially by the miller's thumbs, 

 the sheepshead, the white and striped bass, the common perch, 

 thirteen species of the darters, both the black bass, seven of 

 the sunfishes, the rock bass and the croppies, the pirate perch, 

 the brook silversides, the sticklebacks, the mud minnow, three 

 top minnows, the gizzard shad, the toothed herring, twelve 

 species each of the true minnow family and of the suckers and 

 buffalo, five catfishes, the dog-fish and the shovel-fish — seventy 

 species out of the eighty-seven which I studied. 



Of the four principal classes of the food of fishes, viz., fishes, 

 mollusks, insects, and Crustacea^ the latter stand third in impor- 

 tance according to my observations, mollusks alone being 



