COMMON FISHES OF MISSISSIPPI RIVER 
161 
Wis., and found a much higher ratio of fish to other food — fish remains 96.6 per cent, 
and crawfish remains 3.3 per cent. It is in any event a severe competitor to more 
esteemed fishes. It is a strange corollary of our prevailing schemes of conservation 
of fish that destructive species such as the bowfin are rather rigidly although unin- 
tentionally protected in many waters where, in the supposed interest of angling, pro- 
hibitions are imposed against the only methods of fishing by which the numbers of 
bowfin and other “coarse fishes” can be reduced effectively; that is, against the 
use of nets. 
A lover of sluggish waters, the bowfin is abundant in the Great Lakes region, in 
the Mississippi Valley from Minnesota to Louisiana, and in the east from New York to 
Florida. It seems to like the weedy waters, frequenting shallows at night and 
returning to deeper places by day. In some places it is taken at night with jacklantern 
and spear. In winter they have been found closely huddled in gravelly pockets 
among water weeds. Nesting, as observed by Reighard and others, takes place in 
quiet shallow places among vegetation, stumps, roots, and logs, the male guarding 
the nest and protecting the young, which move in schools until they are about 4 inches 
long. 
Under the conditions of our observations very few bowfin were observed, but we 
know of their presence in the lake and its environs, and it seemed a reasonable pre- 
sumption that the sluggish backwaters, with their weeds and brush, would be favor- 
able to the production of bowfin. The catches of bowfin in the four years of statistical 
canvass of Lake Pepin were 1,534 pounds in 1914, 2,402 pounds in 1917, 16,136 pounds 
in 1922, and 3,334 pounds in 1927. For Lake Keokuk the fish was reported only in 
1917 (26,000 pounds) and in 1927 (14,055 pounds). In the case of this fish irregulari- 
ties in commercial yield might reflect only fluctuations of demand, but it was the 
common report of fishermen in 1926 that “dogfish” were not very abundant in the 
lake or in the river, although still taken and marketed principally in the spring. One 
chief source of supply in 1917, Green Bay, was eliminated by drainage in 1919, 
From all we know of the habits of the bowfin, the dam could have no deleterious effect 
upon its propagation. Perhaps it was never so numerous as some have supposed; 
it would seem more abundant when regarded as a nuisance than when in some demand. 
The weightiest testimony as to diminution of bowfin comes from trotline fishermen 
of the lake and of the region of Fairport to the effect that large schools of “dogfish 
m inn ows” can no longer be found for use as bait. 
THE HERRINGLIKE FISHES 
Under this head we are concerned at Keokuk with a true shad, a herring or ale- 
wife, the gizzard shad, and the mooneyes. Following the systematic order, we con- 
sider first the mooneyes— silvery, herringlike fishes, of which there are two species 
that occur in the Mississippi Basin from the Ohio River northward and also in the 
Great Lakes region and the Saskatchewan. 
Nowhere do the fishermen appear to distinguish the two species, which are, how- 
ever, rather readily recognizable. Dr. Franz Schrader, while an investigator for the 
Bureau of Fisheries, observed that although both species have a tint of gold in the 
eye the larger species ( alosoides ) has a pronounced ring of gold where only a portion 
of the iris is washed with gold in the other. This is the basis for the names proposed 
in this report— goldeye and white-eye. There are distinguishing structural marks that 
are easily observed. Alosoides has the belly keeled in front of ventrals as well as 
behind, tergisus only behind; the dorsal fin of alosoides is short, with only 9 rays, and 
