ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY Bl'LLKTIX 



127 



against its enemies, 

 since only a fish of ex- 

 traordinary gape can 

 take one in whole ; the 

 ordinary fish in biting at 

 a puffer merely pushes 

 it away or causes it to 

 roll over. Further these 

 fishes, especially the 

 ones called porcupine- 

 fishes, are covered with 

 spines, Diodon hustrix, 

 with its long, slender, 

 needle-pointed spines, 

 being the best example. 

 If the puffers with few 

 and weak spines are 

 well protected by their 

 ability to inflate them- 

 selves how much more 



are those like Diodon, which when inflated are 

 covered hedgehog-like with an almost impene- 

 trable forest of fine pointed spines. 



Some of the puffers grow to be three feet 

 long, but these are the giants of the tribe. The 

 largest ever seen by the writer was about two 

 feet long, and the smallest about the size of a 

 forty-four-caliber bullet, or the size of the end 

 of one's little finger. This was a little Chilo- 

 mycterus antillarum, as its name indicates, a 

 straggler from the far south, taken by the writer 

 in a tide-pool, on a sandbar in the mouth of 

 Beaufort Harbor. It was an interesting little 

 fish, and, as it was kept in an aquarium for 

 some time, it became a pet. It fed greedilv on 

 bits of oyster and I 

 used, when it was trying 

 to swallow a fragment 

 of oyster, to take it in 

 my hand and tickle it 

 on the belly whereupon 

 it would partly inflate 

 its abdomen. Then when 

 freed in the aquarium it 

 would set its tiny fins 

 and sculling with its di- 

 minutive tail would 

 make its way to the bot- 

 tom. However, its small 

 specific gravity would 

 not let it remain there, 

 and like a true balloon 

 it would come to the sur- 

 face only to begin the 

 struggle again, and this 



would continue until the oyster was swallowed 

 so that the air could be discharged. 



The puffers belong to that suborder of fishes 



4— DRIE D BUR-FISH 

 Photographed from above by the 



known as Gymnodontes, 

 naked-toothed fishes, so 

 called because the lips 

 are drawn away from 

 the teetli which in turn 

 are solidly fused into 

 beak-like masses. The 

 puffers considered in 

 this paper belong to two 

 of the four families 

 which comprise the 

 Gymnodontes. The first 

 family is that of the 

 puffers proper, the Te- 

 traodontida?, so called 

 because each beak is di- 

 vided by a suture in the 

 median line into two 

 halves, making four 

 parts to the jaws; tetra, 

 four; dens, tooth: four-toothed. These fish 

 have an inflatable sac lying outside the peri- 

 toneum with an opening in the esophagus. The 

 other family is that of the porcupine or globe- 

 fishes, the Diodontidse, which have no suture or 

 fissure, and hence are Diodontids (di, two; 

 dens, tooth) two toothed. These inflate the ab- 

 domen by taking air or water into the stomach, 

 its exit being controlled by sphincter muscles 

 in the gullet. 



The common puffer, swell-fish, or swell-toad 

 of our Atlantic Coast is the Tetraodont Sphe- 

 roides maculatus whose name describes its ap- 

 pearance quite accurately. It is taken so fre- 

 quently in the seine at Beaufort that it is not 

 even regarded as a curi- 

 osity. Figure one is a 

 side view of this fish 

 showing how it distends 

 itself with water. 



Another Tetraodont 

 puffer found on the 

 North Carolina coast. 

 is the so-called rabbit- 

 fish, Lagocephalus laevi- 

 gatas. While not com- 

 mon at Beaufort, the 

 fish is occasionally ta- 

 ken in haul-seines, and 

 in the course of ten sum- 

 mers' work at the Bu- 

 reau of Fisheries labo- 

 ratory there the writer 

 has seen some half doz- 

 en specimens. The fish 

 justifies its name — laevigatus, smoothed; Lago- 

 cephalus, hare-head — inasmuch as the head and 

 mouth somewhat resemble those of a rabbit, and 



