57 



large-mouthed black bass had likewise eaten food of this 

 description. 



Considering the wealth of vegetation accessible to aquatic 

 animals, and the fact that few other strictly aquatic kinds have 

 the vegetarian habit, it is indeed remarkable that fishes draw 

 from plants an unimportant part of their diet. Taking our nine 

 hundred specimens together, the vegetation eaten by them cer- 

 tainly would have amounted to less than ten per cent, of their 

 entire food, and excluding vegetable objects apparently taken 

 by chance, it probably would not reach five per cent. 



The greatest vegetarians are among the minnow family. 

 Counting each genus as a unit, I find that the family as a whole 

 obtained from plants about twenty-three per cent, of its food. 

 The little Phenacobius, already reported as strictly insectivorous, 

 was the only one studied in which vegetation can scarcely be 

 said to occur. 



Certain of the sunfishes evidently take plant food purposely 

 on occasion, this making, for example, nearly a tenth of the 

 food of forty-seven specimens of Lepomis. Among the larger 

 fishes, the principal vegetarians are the gizzard shad, in which 

 this element was reckoned at about a third, taken, however, not 

 separately, but with quantities of mud. A considerable part of 

 the vegetation here included, consisted of distillery slops obtained 

 near towns. The buffalo fishes are likewise largely vegetarians, 

 more than a fourth of their food coming from the vegetable 

 kingdom ; about a third of this in our specimens being refuse 

 from distilleries. Vegetation made a tenth of the food of the 

 larger genera of catfishes (Amiurus and Ictalurus) — some of it 

 distillery refuse — and nearly as large a ratio of the great Polyo- 

 don. 



Not infrequently, terrestrial vegetable rubbish — seeds of 

 grasses, leaves of plants, and similar matter — was taken in quan- 

 tity to make it certain that its appropriation was not accidental. 

 The principal mud-eating fishes are the gizzard shad, the com- 

 mon shiner, and certain genera of minnows with elongate 

 intestines and cultrate pharyngeal teeth. Much mud was also 

 taken by the cylindrical members of the sucker family, but 

 apparently as an incident to their search for mollusks. 



