ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 



At present the New York Aquarium can ex- 

 hibit nothing except what will stand the rather 

 rough treatment involved in the use of shipping 

 tanks. Our list of interesting marine forms 

 which cannot be handled by this method is a 

 large one. 



By the use of a well-smack the expense of 

 collecting and the loss of specimens in transit 

 could be greatly reduced. 



The people of New York have missed seeing 

 many wonderful marine creatures because the 

 Aquarium has never been able to add a boat 

 with a large water compartment to its collect- 

 ing equipment. 



Who wants to buy the Aquarium a well-smack? 



THE MIGRATIONS OE FISH 

 By Ida M. Mellen 



Alexander Meek, in his book on The Migra- 

 tions of Fish (1916), records various interest- 

 ing phenomena, special and general, illustrative 

 of the habits and activities of fishes. 



He shows that many fishes, like many birds, 

 migrate with the seasons; and, like birds that 

 fly witli or against the wind, fishes swim with 

 or against the current. 



That currents are an incentive to a change of 

 habitat is evidenced by the fact that ocean fishes 

 are much more prone to migrations than fresh- 

 water species. 



Some of the principal ocean currents have 

 special designations, as the Mediterranean, the 

 Canary, the Japanese, the Northern Icelandic, 

 and the Counter Equatorial current, also the 

 Gulf Stream; besides which there are numerous 

 superficial, circulatory, and bottom currents, 

 unnamed. Some of the arctic currents are green, 

 and some, issuing from the tropics, arc dark 

 blue. 



Mr. Meek gives a chart of the oceanic cur- 

 rents of the world, which presents as bewilder- 

 ing a maze as one could well imagine. It is as 

 though the seas were designed from the famous 

 old puzzle, Pigs in the Clover; and after seeing 

 it. we wonder, not that salt water fishes journey 

 hundreds of miles, but that the} 7 are ever found 

 twice in the same locality. We are not surprised 

 that the sheepshead, whose one-time steady 

 presence around Long Island gave Sheepshead 

 Bay its name, is no longer commonly found in 

 these waters, but farther south ; that the basking 

 shark, formerly a regular migrant to the North 

 Sea. now limits its hunting grounds to the Irish 

 and Norwegian coasts; or that the mackerel is 



reported to be quitting this side of the Atlantic 

 for the other. 



Salt water buoys up an egg that would sink 

 in fresh water, and multitudes of the eggs and 

 larvae of ocean fishes float upon or immediately 

 beneath the surface of the sea, carried along by 

 currents for days, weeks, or months, in passive 

 migration. Great quantities of the fry of a 

 single species may settle together on the bot- 

 tom of a region remote from the ground .>n 

 which they were spawned ; or the fry of several 

 species may become mixed together. 



The migrations of fishes are not. however, due 

 essentially to currents, but to several other 

 causes. 



Migration may be actuated by the food sup- 

 ply. Both young and old fishes are subject to 

 periodic migration. The young are also af- 

 fected by seasons, and enter upon so-called sea- 

 sonal migrations, while the older fishes engage 

 in yearly spawning migrations under the im- 

 pulse of sexual maturity, which occurs when 

 they are three or more years old. The migra- 

 tory instinct is so powerful in the mature fishes 

 that considerable loss of life ensues among some 

 species during these "annual pulsations" from 

 the sheer exhaustion of travel. They generally 

 have regular spawning grounds. The salmon, 

 marine lampreys, and most of the herrings and 

 shads enter the rivers to spawn ; while the eel 

 journeys from fresh water to the ocean. Some 

 species migrate from the shore to mid-oeean, 

 some rise from the depths to spawn at the sur- 

 face. They are all nocturnal in habit. The 

 deep-sea species, during migration, move up- 

 ward by night, feeding and traveling, and down- 

 ward by day, to rest. Dogfishes migrate in large 

 companies into shallow water for the summer, 

 and deep water for the winter. Herring also 

 migrate in enormous shoals, and one writer es- 

 timates that if a herring be allowed for every 

 cubic foot, and a shoal 18 feet deep is limited to 

 one square mile (many are of vastly larger di- 

 mensions), it would contain 500,000.000 fish. 

 "The herring." he says, "would literally choke 

 the sea if not largely destroyed by other fish as 

 well as by birds." 



Some of the lung fishes of Africa hibernate in 

 mud in the winter, and this is looked upon as a 

 substitute for migration. It appears that the 

 majority of fishes are great travelers. 



Attendance. — The number of visitors at the 

 Aquarium to date has fallen off somewhat as 

 compared with the same period of 1917. The 

 million mark was passed in September. 



