THE SPANISH MACKEREL AND THE CEROES. 189 
In Genio C. Scott’s “Fishing in American Waters” is an interesting 
little picture of a school of Spanish Mackerel feeding, which is worthy of 
examination. 
Both Earll and Stearns agree in the statement that this is a fish which 
lives almost entirely at the surface. On a calm bright day in summer, the 
surface of the Chesapeake or the Gulf of Mexico is sometimes broken up 
for miles by the movements of large schools of these fishes, while the air 
is enlivened by the screaming flocks of terns, which follow them, to gather 
up the fragments of their feasts. Similar scenes may occasionally be wit¬ 
nessed off the coast of New Jersey and the Carolinas, but further to the 
southward their abundance is less. 
The schools are frequently observed at a long distance from the shore, 
especially when they are first approaching in the spring. Mr. Earll has 
also called attention to the fact that they avoid brackish waters, and thus 
accounts for their abundance on the eastern side of the Chesapeake, and 
their comparative absence near the opposite shores where the salinity of 
the waters is lessened by the inflow of the Potomac, Rappahannock, the 
York and the James. During the spawning season they frequent the 
warmest and shoalest waters to which they can gain access. 
The diet of the Spanish Mackerel is like that of the blue-fish, entirely 
carnivorous, and there is no reason to doubt that the menhaden or moss- 
bunker is its principal quaving. Mackerel, mullet, silversides and all our 
other schooling species contribute also a share to its support. 
The breeding habits of this fish were never understood until the spring 
of 1880, when, to the astonishment of everyone, it was found by Mr. Earll 
that their spawning grounds are in the Chesapeake Bay and at other 
localities on the middle Atlantic coast, while Mr. Silas Stearns, almost 
simultaneously discovered a breeding place in the Gulf of Mexico. Mr. 
Earll, to whom science is indebted for a most thorough and comprehensive 
study of the reproductive habits of this fish, has published a full account 
of his observations, and of his experiments in practical fish-culture in one 
of the annual reports of the U. S. Fish Commission,* to which the reader 
is referred for detailed statements, since it is not the purpose of this book 
to enter into prolonged discussions of such a character. 
Mr. Earll found evidence that the species spawns not only in the Sandy 
*R. E. Earll. The Spanish Mackerel. Report U. S. Comm. Fisheries, 1880. (1883) pp. 395-426. 
