NOTROPIS 143 



monest longshore minnows in southern Lake Michigan, swarming 

 especially about the piers off Chicago, where it is caught in quanti- 

 ties and sold for bait. 



Although reported from South Carolina, it is essentially a 

 northern species, ranging from New England, Quebec, and the Lake 

 of 'the Woods through the Hudson and Great Lake basin to the 

 streams of the Missouri in Minnesota and the Dakotas. It is 

 abundant in the Great Lakes and at the mouths of the rivers 

 opening into them. In Ohio and in Indiana, as in Illinois, it is 

 generally confined to the northern parts of *the state. 



It is a typical minnow in its food, depending on insects, crusta- 

 ceans, and vegetation, the latter partly algae of the filamentous 

 forms and partly fragments of aquatic plants. This general state- 

 ment does not indicate the variety of its resources or the seeming 

 indifference with which it will fill itself with one or the other kind 

 of food which it finds most abundant. One of our specimens, for 

 example, had eaten nothing but algae, and these plants made three 

 fourths of the food of another. Three had eaten only insects, and 

 these were 90 per cent., or more, of the food of three others. Two 

 had taken nothing but Entomostraca, all a species of Cypris feeding 

 upon the bottom. Four had filled themselves with various vege- 

 table structures, and 90 per cent. , or more, of the food of three others 

 consisted of like material. Three out of four of these minnows, 

 taken at Nippersink Lake in May, had eaten only terrestrial snout- 

 beetles (Rhynchophora) , whose occurrence in the water was a mat- 

 ter of chance. The larvas of day-flies (Ephemerida) made more 

 than three fourths of the food of three other specimens. One had 

 eaten a small fish, and traces of like food -were found in another. 



NOTROPIS LUTRENSIS (Baird & Girard) 



(redfin) 



Baird & Girard, 1853, Proc. Ac. Nat. Sci. Phila., 397 (Leuciscus). 



G VII, 258 (Leuciscus); J. & G., 172 (Cliola iris and C. jugalis), 174 (C. gibbosa 

 and C. forbesi), 175 (C. lutrensis), 176 (C. suavis), 177 (billingsiana) ; M. V., 

 57; J. & E., I, 271; J., 57 (Cyprinella forbesi) ; F.,77; L., 17. 



This little fish is especially distinguished arriong Illinois Cyprinidcz by 

 the brilliancy of its color and by the depth and thinness of its body, fully 

 grown specimens not seldom having the depth in length less than 2f . It 

 is very nearly allied to the next species, N . whipplii, compared with 

 which it seems to be merely a more specialized form, the two sometimes 

 intergrading in an obscure and very puzzling way, It may, however, be 

 distinguished from the next species, as a rule, by its greater depth when 



