WHY FISH DON'T ALWAYS BITE. 107 



I have wasted no hours between 11 o'clock a. m. and 4 or 5 o'clock p. m. There 

 is usually a good spurt in the evening, when fish bite freely. 



\VIXTKR-KILLED FISHES. 



People are often puzzled to account for the mortality among fishes, which 

 are frequently found dead in large numbers, in the ocean and inland waters 

 alike, and at different seasons of the year, sometimes in midsummer and some- 

 times in the spring after the ice breaks up. There should be no mystery in this. 

 Why should not fishes be subject, like animals, to epidemics from diseases and 

 widespread death from natural causes? 



If we turn to the elements of natural history we read that fishes are cold- 

 blooded vertebrates which live exclusively in water, and respire by means of gills 

 instead of lungs ; and that in process of breathing, the oxygen needed is secured 

 from the air which is mingled with the water. Fishes, no less than animals, are 

 kept alive by air, and without it they die. The phenomenon referred to by your 

 correspondent "J. G. R." in a recent issue of The Angler, where great quantities 

 of pickerel were found dead in Lake Umbagog, Maine, after the ice went out 

 in the spring, is one of the causes of fish mortality most easily explained. The 

 fish died from want of air. 



If we place a given number of animals in a circumscribed apartment where 

 no fresh air is admitted, they will exhaust the oxygen in time, and then die. In 

 like manner, if a body of water is hermetically sealed by ice, the oxygen it con- 

 tains will -be exhausted in time, and the fish will die. But ice is porous, and unless 

 it becomes solidified by intense severity of cold, air passes through it into the 

 water below. Also, in temperate climates, there are usually throughout the 

 winter occasional periods of thawing, by which process air is absorbed; the ice 

 along shore is also melted, and air-holes are found in the body of the ice, to 

 which the fish instinctively resort, as animals would do to crevices or open windows 

 in the closed apartment, and are thereby revitalized. Under such conditions no 

 mortality occurs. 



. Sometimes there is an unseasonable rainfall in the winter season which over- 

 flows the ice of ponds or lakes ; or the feeders of those lakes may be swollen by 

 a flood and overflow the ice; and it is thus not uncommon for fish to find their 

 way to the overflowed surface through the air-holes, or the open water along 

 shore, seeking for air. If a hard freeze follows, these fish, becoming benumbed 

 and unable to find their way back, are frozen in and remain imbedded until the 

 ice finally melts in the spring and leaves their released carcasses floating on the 

 surface of the water. 



Again, when the winter is ushered in by extremely cold weather, and the 

 water freezes rapidly, fish will congregate at open spaces for air, keeping near 

 the surface, and before they are aware of it the ice forms around them and in- 

 closes them. I have seen large blocks of clear ice cut from the surface of deep 

 ponds for domestic uses, containing many catfish and bull-heads, which are bottom 

 fish with hibernating habits ; but the winter unexpectedly overtook them before 

 they were ready to assume their torpid state and bury themselves in the mud. 

 Ordinarily they would have avoided such a catastrophe. 



Some fish are more subject than others to mortality from this cause. Pickerel, 

 for instance, as referred to by your correspondent, prefer to keep on the shoals 

 near shore among the aquatic plants and weeds. In winters of alternate thawing 

 and freezing, they would be even better off there than in the deeper waters, be- 



