DRAGONFUES. AND DAMSELFLIES IN PONDFISH CULTURE. 23 1 



adult fish, which have been taken out of the other ponds to prevent them from eating 

 the young fish. They get hungry in this small pond and have to be fed at times. 

 Among the foods given to them have been dragonfly nymphs, Ana:^; junius and L.luctuosa, 

 obtained from other ponds when the water was drawn from them. The fish in pond 6 

 always eat these with avidity, consuming all that are thrown to them, sometimes 

 several hundreds. 



This fact carries with it several suggestions as to the methods of dealing with 

 these n5niiphs. Whenever a pond is drained, as many of the nymphs as possible 

 should be saved for further use. If the water is lowered gradually, the nymphs, like the 

 fish, will follow it down to the last pool, from which they can be easily removed with a 

 dip net. They can then be used to restock the pond from which they came, after it is 

 filled again, or they can be fed to the fish in other ponds. 



Atkins in a discussion of Foods for Young Salmonoid Fishes (1908) said: "Any 

 departure, therefore, from a live-food regimen must be regarded as having the pre- 

 sumption against its entire stability" (p. 841); and, again quoting from the Allgemeine 

 Fischerei Zeitung, "for breeding fishes under all circumstances live, natural food is the 

 most suitable" (p. 841). 



Here is a live-natural food that can often be obtained in large quantities and of 

 various sizes suited to the different growths of fish, and methods of stocking a pond 

 with this kind of food will be discussed later (p. 234). 



ODONATE IMAGOS AS FISH FOOD. 



The only time that a fish gets a chance to catch a dragonfly imago is during 

 ovipositing. The Argia females that back down beneath the surface of the water to 

 deposit their eggs must face the danger of being snapped up by some hungry fish, and 

 many of them are probably caught at such times. (See p. 257.) The same will be true 

 of other damselfly species, since most of them alight on something at the surface, and 

 at least thrust their abdomen into the water while ovipositing. 



Both bass and sunfish jump eagerly after ovipositing dragonflies, but, like William- 

 son, the present author has never seen a fish actually catch one of them. However, on 

 opening the stomachs of bass from pond 6 that had been killed for experimental pur- 

 poses dragonfly imagos were found in more than half of them, showing that at times 

 they are successful in their efforts. Several times the author caught dragonflies in 

 the net, crippled their wings so that they could not fly, and threw them on the surface 

 of pond 6. In almost every instance they were seized and swallowed as soon as they 

 struck the water, but two or three that failed to wiggle after hitting the water were 

 left untouched. These fish would not snap at dead food of any sort, and they came up 

 to these dragonflies until their nose almost touched the insect and waited patiently for 

 some movement indicating life. If the dragonfly wiggled ever so little it was swallowed 

 instantly, but if it remained motionless it was left untouched. 



Tillyard (191 7, p. 330) has the following record: "A 2-pound trout which I caught 

 on the Macquarie River in Tasmania had in its stomach the undigested heads of 35 

 dragonflies, 28 belonging to the rather rare species Procordulia jacksonensis." 



In the record of fish food given to the author by Dr. Muttkowski are two instances 

 of fish eating imago damselflies. (See table, p. 227.) The stomach of a black bullhead, 



