FIBER ZIBETHICUS. 
I8 7 
The Muskrat as a Fish-eater. 
That the Muskrat is not commonly considered a fish-eater is 
evident from the absence of reference to such habit in the published 
accounts of the animal. Robert Kennicott and Gov. DeWitt Clinton 
are, so far as I have been able to ascertain, the only authors who 
mention this trait. Kennicott says : “ Excepting in eating mollusks, 
and occasionally a dead fish, I am not aware that this species departs 
from a vegetable diet.” * 
Gov. Clinton, writing in 1820 of the then newly built Erie Canal, 
in New York, said : “ In winter, when the water is frozen, muskrats 
go under the ice and prey on the fish. They are very destructive to 
trout, which is already in the canal.” j* 
At a meeting of the Biological Society of Washington, held in the 
National Museum, December 14th, 1883, Mr. Henry W. Elliott 
spoke of the “ Appetite of the Muskrat .” He stated that in certain 
parts of Ohio the Muskrat did great injury to Carp ponds, not only 
by perforating the banks and dams and thus letting oft' the water, but 
also by actually capturing and devouring the Carp, which is a sluggish 
fish, often remaining motionless, half buried in the mud. In the dis- 
cussion that followed, Dr. Mason Graham Ellzey said that from boy- 
hood he had been familiar with the fact that the Muskrat sometimes 
ate fish. In fact, he had seen Muskrats in the act of devouring fish 
that had recently been caught and left upon the bank. The President, 
Dr. Charles A. White, narrated a similar experience. 
On the 7th of February, 1884, I brought this subject to the notice 
of the Linnaean Society of New York, and asked if any of the mem- 
bers knew the Muskrat to be a fish-eater. Dr. Edgar A. Mearns 
said that he had long been familiar with the fact, and that it was no 
uncommon thing to see a Muskrat munching a dead fish upon the 
borders of the salt marshes along the Hudson. He had shot them 
* Quadrupeds of Illinois Injurious and Beneficial to the Farmer, 1857, p. 106. 
f Letters on the Natural History and Internal Resources of the State of New York. By 
Hibernicus, 1822, p. 46. 
