76 
FOREST AND STREAM 
July 20, 1912 
Wee Fighters in Big Waters 
By RETTA KING TOURISON 
(Assistant to the Superintendent of the Fairmount Park Aquarium.) 
T HERE is an aquatic warrior which, in some 
parts of the country, people call sunfish; 
in others, pumpkin seed; again he is known 
as “kivers,” and in the South as bream. For a 
noted fish he is very small, among the smallest 
of the fighting fishes, for he rarely exceeds a 
length of six or seven inches. What he lacks 
in size he more than makes up in brilliancy of 
color, in ambition, energy and courage. He is 
a wee fighter in big waters. Tiny as lie is the 
small boy and the grown ups love the little 
“scrapper.” 
In shape he is flat and nearly circular, hence 
his name—pumpkin seed and “kiver.” He is al¬ 
ways hungry, and boys soon discover that when 
he seizes a hook, he swallows it just as a cat¬ 
fish does, almost to his tail. His appetite is so 
insatiable that he will come up from the bottom 
of the water with a rush and take a hook cov¬ 
ered with feathers—the artificial fly—and sports¬ 
men declare that he does it with the vim of a 
trout. When hooked he does not quietly sub¬ 
mit to adverse fate, but makes a gallant and 
stubborn fight for his life. 
Although ever hungry and eager to snatch 
at food, the sunfish hunts deliberately and even 
daintily. When lie sights a prospective tid-bit, 
he pauses a short distance from it, balancing by 
quick movements of his pectoral fins, and a 
gentle waving of his caudal. Soberly, contem¬ 
platively, he eyes his prey; then a swift dart 
forward, and the little jaws close quickly over 
the trophy of his chase. 
The “sunny” delights in clear streams and 
ponds. In winter he goes into deep water, but 
when the spring raises the temperature, he comes 
into the shallows and haunts the shores. He 
hunts a sandy spot in early June where the water 
is only about a foot deep, for at this time his 
inclinations have turned to nest building. 
The sunfish has seen his big cousin, the black 
bass, build a nest. He thinks he will construct 
his on the same lines, but so great is his ambi¬ 
tion that he decides to have a home much larger 
than that of his ferocious relative. Now while 
the sunny has, in proportion to his size, just as 
much strength and courage in his wee body as 
the big bass, yet to carry out his architectural 
plans he must choose a site different from the 
bass’s stony estate. Hence the sandy bottom. 
When the sunfish has selected a place he 
spends much time darting back and forth, wag¬ 
ging his tail. He has much the same air of 
superior satisfaction as the “newly weds” who 
have just embarked on the simple life in the 
country. 
By and by dropping close to the sand he 
flirts away the sediment with a rapid fan-like 
motion of his pectoral and ventral fins. It is 
marvelous what speed the sunfish imparts to 
these redimentary arms and legs, and in an in¬ 
credibly short time he clears a circular space of 
more than two feet in diameter, where the sand 
glistens white and clean. As the sunfish fans 
he turns and turns without ceasing, so that the 
sand is thrown in an unbroken mound around 
the edge of the circle, and a well defined rim is 
formed. 
The sunfish delves with the object of pene¬ 
trating the sand and reaching fine gravel. Some¬ 
times he succeeds. If he fails he does not 
abandon the spot, but goes to work and little 
by little carries home gravel from wherever he 
can find it. On these errands, having no wheel¬ 
barrow, he uses his mouth. When this task is 
done the center of the nest presents a circle of 
about eight inches or more in diameter, covered 
with pebbles the size of small peas. When 
everything is symmetrical and scrupulously clean, 
the sunfish goes a-courting, and when he finds 
a mate, he coaxes her to the nest where she is 
to lay her eggs. 
The sunfish is as dainty in his courtship as 
in his every day life, and very loving. While he 
follows the same general method of making love 
as his cousin, the black bass, he is not rude or 
rough. He swims in graceful circles around and 
around the female, tilting sidewise until the light 
catches the opalescent colors of his scales. He 
sidles up to her and with open mouth touches 
her on the cheek just as though he were kissing 
her. 
The female seems to accept this all as a 
matter of course and with much complacency, 
unless, as sometimes happens, she decides to re¬ 
ject him, when she flouts the wooer contemptu¬ 
ously with a toss of her tail and swims away. 
Even so, he will try his luck with another. 
He follows the maxim that there “are just as 
good fish in the sea” as she. Yet, when he suc¬ 
ceeds, it often appears that the male sunfish, in 
building a nest, has gone beyond the ability of 
the female to provide a sufficient number of eggs 
to fill it. This does not satisfy his sunfishship. 
It leaves a waste of good house room which he 
has so carefully prepared. He wants his nursery 
filled. So, obsessed with this idea, he sallies 
forth in search of a second mate. Sometimes 
the little Mormon brings as many as five wives 
home to the nest. 
When at length there are as many eggs de¬ 
posited as he thinks desirable, the sunfish gen¬ 
erally drives all but one of the females away. 
He may keep his first wife, and in the expulsion 
of the discarded mates he is assisted by the 
favored one. They rush open-mouthed and sav¬ 
agely at the unfortunates, and woe betide the 
one the pursuers overtake. She is likely to lose 
one of her fins or a piece out ef her side in this 
brief period of savagery. Generally the ousted 
females take their ejection philosophically, and 
as a matter of course, seeking safety in hasty 
flight. 
Housekeeping now begins in earnest. The 
female scouts on the outside and forages for 
herself. But the male poises over the center of 
the nest, now and then darting away to assure 
himself that all is well. He takes no food; 
even if a most toothsome morsel falls directly 
into the nest, he tosses it out, and with scarcely 
any rest he is on duty day and night. 
The approach of an intruder fills the sunfish 
with rage. His fins are all raised and expanded 
to their fullest extent. It matters not how big, 
or what the species of fish the interloper may 
be, the sunfish pauses but for an instant, then 
darts open-mouthed and fearlessly in assault. 
Strange to say the onslaught of the sunfish 
is almost invariably successful. There seems to 
be something about a nest-building fish which 
inspires respect and even fear in the hearts of 
other fish. A pickerel, for instance, might be 
able to swallow a sunfish at a single gulp, and 
under ordinary circumstances would do so, but 
he sedulously avoids a sunfish nest when the 
parent fish is there. 
The young of these wee fighters, the sunfish, 
begin life like all other fish by emerging from 
the egg tail first, and the diminutive creatures— 
for they are mere specks—cling closely to the 
fine gravel in the nest where they wag their tiny 
tails in apparent joy at being alive and in the 
world. There are thousands of them in one of 
these sunfish nurseries, and they are so close 
together and wagging their tails so rapidly and 
persistently that when the sunshine falls on the 
water and illuminates the nest, there appears but 
a rippling of a reddish yellow mass. 
The domestic cares of the sunfish are now 
doubled, yet at this point the female deserts, and 
the up-bringing of the family rests wholly with 
the male, and to this work he rises nobly. For¬ 
tunately the little father does not have to pre¬ 
pare food for his thousands of babies, because 
for some days after birth the young sunfish has 
attached to its body a sac, on the contents of 
which it lives by absorption. When this food is 
gone, the mass of tiny sunfish rises from among 
the stones toward the surface with rapid awk¬ 
ward movements. Their father sweeps grace¬ 
fully about among them as though to teach them 
how to swim easily, and to the best advantage. 
When about two weeks old all these boys 
and girl fishes are ready to shift for themselves, 
and then the parental instinct deserts the father. 
He darts into their midst and ruthlessly “chases” 
them. Frightened at the changed attitude of 
their father the young sunfish scurry to the 
shoal water and hide among the grasses. The 
father turns, swims away and promptly forgets 
his children. 
The Illinois fish commissioners are continu¬ 
ing their warfare against the garfish which are 
becoming so plentiful in the waters of this 
State, and which are destroyers of game fish. A 
large specimen was seined in the Mississippi re¬ 
cently which contained forty pounds of spawn 
and weighed 238 pounds. The law provides that 
gars must be killed whenever taken by hook or 
seine, and all fishermen who recognize the de¬ 
structive characteristics of this species kill these 
fish before returning them to the water. 
