THE ALLIES OF THE PERCH: PISCES 319 



Europe as well as in the United States and Canada. One of 

 the European species grows to be over twenty feet long. 



The remaining bony fishes have fully ossified skeletons. 

 The eels are forms in which the body is greatly elongated 

 and the scales reduced to almost invisible rudiments. Loco- 

 motion is effected by snake-like movements of the body. 

 The common eel (Angml'la chrys'ypa) of North America is 

 found along the Atlantic coast from Newfoundland to Central 

 America, and in most streams and ponds in the eastern states 



Fi<;. 158. Photograph of Sturgeon 

 (From Jordan and Evermann's American Food and Game Fishes) 



which are accessible from the sea. The young are hatched 

 on mud-banks in the Atlantic Ocean, often near the mouth 

 of a river. The eggs are laid in the fall, and the young, at 

 the beginning of the second spring, find their way in count- 

 less numbers up the various streams, where they complete 

 their development and return to the sea to spawn. After 

 providing for the new generation the adult eels die, never 

 returning to fresh water. The number of young produced 

 has been estimated, in the case of an eel thirty-two inches 

 long, to be 10,700,000. Eels may grow to be four feet long. 



