1 62 POLAR PROBLEMS 



winter life of the insects. For the lagoon has no outlet and appears to 

 freeze completely to the bottom." 



Lucien M, Turner, who had ample opportunity to study this 

 extraordinary fish on the American side at St. Michael, Alaska, says^^ 

 that "it is found in all the small streams of the low grounds, in the 

 wet morasses and sphagnum-covered areas, which are soaked with 

 water and which at times seem to contain but sufficient water to more 

 than moisten the skin of the fish. In the low grounds or tundra are 

 many — countless thousands — small ponds of very slight depth, con- 

 nected with each other by small streams of variable width, of few feet to 

 those so narrow as to be hidden by the overlapping sedges or sphagnum 

 moss. . . . These narrower outlets of the ponds are at certain 

 seasons so full of these fish that they completely block them up. 

 ... In such situations they collect in such numbers that figures 

 fail to express an adequate idea of their numbers. They are to be 

 measured by the yard. Their mass is deep according to the nature of 

 the retreat. If it is a pond overgrown with sedges and mosses which 

 by their non-conductivity of heat allows only a slight depth to be 

 thawed out in the short Arctic summer, the fish mass will completely 

 fill it up." "Here the fish are partially protected from the great cold of 

 winter by the covering of moss and grass. " "They form the principal 

 food of the natives living between the Yukon Delta and the Kuskokvim 

 River and as far interior as the bases of the higher hills. North of the 

 Yukon Delta they are also abundant. . . . When taken from 

 the traps [by the natives] the fish are immediately put into . . . 

 baskets and taken to the village, where [they] are placed on stages 

 . . . out of the way of the dogs. Here the fish are exposed to the 

 severe temperature and cold winds." Under such circumstances the 

 mass of fish is frozen in a few minutes, and, when needed for food for 

 man or dogs, they have to be chopped out with ax or club. Turner 

 proceeds: "The vitality of these fish is astonishing. They will remain 

 in those grass-baskets for weeks, and when brought into the house and 

 thawed out they will be as lively as ever." He also mentions a case 

 where he saw a dog which had swallowed a frozen fish vomit it up 

 alive, thawed out by the heat of the stomach! It having been made 

 probable on other grounds that the Bering Strait region has never 

 been covered by a solid ice sheet, we are quite prepared to believe that 

 this fish in its present habitat may have survived the entire Glacial 

 Period. Knowing, moreover, that it belongs to a very ancient group 

 of fishes, in Dr. Gill's classification^^ occupying a separate "order," 

 Xenomi, by itself, we must also concede that it offers no proof of a 



12 L. M. Turner: Contributions to the Natural History of Alaska (Arctic Series of Publications 

 Issued in Connection with the Signal Service, U. S. Army, No. 2), Washington, 1886 [publ. 1888J, 

 p. lOI. 



13 Theodore Gill: An Important Arctic Fish (in "Record of Scientific Progress for 1883: Zoology"), 

 Ann. Kept. Smithsonian Instn.for 1883, Washington, 1885, pp. 727-728. 



