120 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 
ington. This, with similar material from other waters taken at various 
seasons, will, when studied, be sufficient to establish the food of the 
carp—a question about which conflicting opinions are held—and also 
afford a basis for comparison of the food of other fishes with similar 
habits found in the same waters. 
Some cursory observations on the food of carp and buffalo-fish were 
made incidentally to the collecting and preserving of their viscera. 
The season was apparently the least favorable for finding large quan- 
tities of food, but this was anticipated; and the material probably 
shows adequately the food for the season. The stomachs were usually 
empty. The food was largely microscopic and contained in what was 
apparently a mass of mud passed on into the intestine, where, rather 
than in the stomach, doubtless the digestion of such nutritive ele- 
ments as the mud contained occurred. Food portions recognizable 
macroscopically were rarely seen. In a few eases fragments of higher 
water plants, such as Ranwnculus, were found in the csophagus and 
may have been taken in accidentally. The color of the small amount 
of fluid contents often found in the stomach indicated that green 
alge had been fed upon. In the Maumee River carp fed constantly 
and largely upon whole wheat lost in the river a season or two previ- 
ously by a grain elevator fire. 
Observations carried on from Central Station in the Potomae River 
near Washington, D. C., during the spawning time of the shad have 
shown that the carp is not at all destructive to shad spawn, the carp 
not frequenting that part of the river bottom where the shad resort 
for reproduction. 
Cat-fish are known to consume immense quantities of the spawn of 
shad and other river fishes, and, with the eel, must be reckoned among 
the most destructive of the natural enemies of the shad in all the 
streams of the Atlantic coast. A seine haul on Albemarle Sound, 
North Carolina, witnessed by the writerin April, strikingly exemplified 
the spawn-eating proclivities of the cat-fish. A large shad seine was 
hauled in the early evening over a ground where a school of shad had 
apparently just spawned. Many shad and alewives were caught, 
but the principal part of the catch consisted of about 5,000 cat-fish 
(Ameiurus albidus), ranging in length from 6 to 18 inches, every one 
of which, so far as observation went, was gorged with shad eggs. 
EXAMINATION OF WEST VIRGINIA STREAMS. 
The examination of the general physical and biological characters 
of the streams of West Virginia, and more especially the nature and 
abundance of the fish life, was continued in the summer of 1900 by a 
party in charge of Mr. W. P. Hay. Field work began at Hinton in 
July, and was carried on for two months, during which time numerous 
streams in the southwestern part of the State, tributary to the Ohio, 
were visited, and extensive collections of fishes and other water ani- 
mals were made. 
