158 



3I0SQUIT0ES 



food, but will feed upon other animals, including- good- 

 sized tadpoles. Anyone who has attempted to keep tad- 

 poles and sticklebacks in the same aquarium will realize 

 the truth of this statement. I once kept a large sized 

 tadpole in the same aquarium with a stickleback, which 

 it exceeded at least five times in size, and its personal 

 beauty w^as soon sadly damaged by the fact that the 

 stickleback subsisted upon meals taken from the edge of 

 the tadpole's tail. In his previously published bulletin 



Fig. 44.— Stickleback {G asterosteus acnleatus) ; somewhat enlarged. 

 (After Jordau and Evermanu.) 



on mosquitoes the writer recommended sticklebacks for 

 introduction into fishless ponds to destroy mosquito lar- 

 V8e, but Mr. W. P. Seal, of the Aquarium Supph^ Com- 

 pany of Delair, N. J., recommends the so-called top-min- 

 nows of the genus Gambusia, common in the brackish 

 waters of the Chesapeake system and southward. He 

 says these are the only fish he knows which will kill No- 

 tonecta (the water-boatman), but they do this only when 

 other food is scarce, and when the bugs are small. The fish 

 vary in size from an inch for the males, to about one and 

 three-quarter inches for the females. They live equally 



