EXPERIMENTS IN PHOTOGRAPHY OF LIVE FISHES. 
By R. W. SHUFELDT. 
Captain , Medical Corps , United Stales Army. 
Up to the present time very few photographs of living fishes have been repro- 
duced and published, and, as compared with the photography of other living forms, 
attempts or successes in this line are extremely rare. There are a number of methods 
by means of which fish may be photographed in their natural element, with natural 
surroundings, as, for example, it is possible to accomplish it beneath the surface of 
the water by the use of some such contrivance as the subaquatic camera used by 
Dr. J. B. Romborsts, or that of M. Bouton, or the apparatus of Regnard. By the 
employment of instantaneous photography some fishes have been taken in the air, in 
the act of “leaping,” as in the case of salmon, or in the act of flight, as in the case 
of the flying-fish. Such pictures as these latter, however, illustrate peculiar habits 
rather than topographical characters of the forms thus secured. To obtain these we 
must resort to the photography of living fishes in suitable aquaria and under proper 
conditions. In such receptacles the types to be photographed may be taken either 
through the glass sides of the aquarium (with or without background) or the exposure 
may be made from above. This, of course, would depend upon the form of the fish and 
its habits in nature, or, in other words, whether the subject was a bass or a flounder. 
Again, certain fish in nature have the habit of occasionally resorting to the dry land, 
and when the opportunity offers species of this kind may be taken upon terra firma in 
various situations, as in the case of the peculiar gobioid Periophthalmus. 
The experiments to be described in the present contribution, however, will be 
restricted to a few the author has made at the aquaria of the U. S. Fish Commission 
building in Washington in July, 1897, and upon various occasions since. The fish in 
these cases were all medium-sized teleostean types, and the photographs were first 
taken through the glass sides of the aquaria in which they are kept in the “ Marine 
Grotto”; and afterwards in a special aquarium placed in the court yard of the build- 
ing during the forenoon of a perfectly clear day in July (1898) — two very different 
conditions. In the first instance the aquaria consist of a series of tanks arranged 
around a rootless corridor, thus admitting sunlight, when protective awnings are not 
in use, only from above. Within the grotto, this series of aquaria comes flush by 
glass-fronts with the wall of the long room, so named. Here they are of glass, 4 or 5 
feet above the floor, and as one enters the grotto the impression is given of mural 
pictures wherein the fish-subjects are alive and moving about. The walls of the grotto 
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