i68 SALT-WATER FISHES 



instead of depositing eggs, give birth to living young after the 

 fashion of most of our sharks and a few of our rays. 



The chief external characters of the blennies are their 

 elongated body and short, thick head, their smooth and 

 generally scaleless skin, and their more or less continuous 

 spineless fringe of dorsal and ventral fins, which edge the body 

 above and below. One or two of them suggest in outward 

 appearance the gadoid rocklings, but are distinguished from 

 these by the absence of barbel. Most of the family keep close 

 to the shore, but an exception is found in the deep-water wolf- 

 fish, the largest of them all, so-called from its sharp teeth, its 

 powerful bite, and its generally carnivorous tastes. For the 

 most part the blennies deposit their eggs in deserted shells 

 and similar convenient receptacles. Cunningham found those 

 of the butterfly blenny {"Blennius ocellaris) in a hollow bone 

 brought up on a hook off the Cornish coast ; while another 

 naturalist made, not long ago, a still more extraordinary find in 

 an enormous whelk-shell that was dredged in the neighbour- 

 hood of Plymouth. There were in the recesses of this shell 

 two separate households, for it accommodated at once a male 

 butterfly blenny and a male two-spotted goby, each guarding 

 its own cluster of eggs. 



Larval blennies also seem to take refuge in strange asylums, 

 for Holt mentions having found a young shanny (B. fholis) in 

 a floating dahlia off Falmouth. This incident only shows how 

 careful collectors should be to search every likely and unlikely 

 corner, for one can conceive of few less promising haunts for a 

 larval sea-fish than the interior of such flotsam as a wind-blown 

 land-flower. 



The Wolf-fish (^Anarrhicas lupus), the largest and only 

 commercially important member of the family, is a northern 

 form. The ventral (throat) fins, never very highly developed 

 in the blennies, are absent altogether in this fish. Its scales 

 are so small as to be almost invisible. Only one other 

 blenny (^Carelophus) has scales at all. 



