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Nature and Art, Vol. VIII, No 1, June 1900

<h3> THE FISH'S PLACE IN NATURE.</h3> DAVID STARR JORDAN. SOME animals have their hard parts on the outside. These may be a horny coat or skin, such as the beetle has, or a double shell, like the oyster's, or a single shell, like the house of a snail. Or they may be a hard crust, like the lobster's coat of mail, or a brittle crust, like the sea-urchin's, or with tough nodules on a leathery hide, as in the star-fish, or any one of a hundred variations from these. But in all such cases there is no backbone, no true skeleton and no real skull. Then there are a host of animals that have their hard parts on the inside. When this is the case the animal has a regular head, generally with a skull inside to protect a brain from hard knocks. Then behind the skull is a backbone made up of a number of separate joints of bone. To the skeleton other bones are attached to help the animal to move himself about on land or in the water. Sometimes these bones grow out as legs, with toes and claws at the tip of them. Sometimes they take the form of wings or they may spread out into flat paddles or oars of one kind or another, and these we call fins. What shape the parts take depends on what the animal does with them, for every kind of beast is built with direct reference to his business in life. The backboned animals are the highest of all the animal kingdom. That is, in general; they can do more things, they have a greater variety of relations to the things around them, and they are more definitely fitted for a high position. Some of them are not very high nor very intelligent, even as compared with their lower brethren, the insects. The ant is a tiny creature, with no skull and no backbone, and cannot do any very big thing. But she is a very wise beast by the side of a carp or a herring. Still, on the whole, the backboned animals are the highest and as you and I both belong to that class we could never afford to confess to any doubts as to their superiority. But we are the highest of the type—that is, we men—and the rest of the tribe are all lower. And the lowest of all backboned animals we call fishes. And we shall know a fish when we see one because the hard parts or skeleton are on the inside, and he stays in the water, breathing the air which is dissolved in it, and he has never any toes or claws or feathers. He breathes with gills and he swims with fins. He has no hair or feathers on his body and when he has any cover on his skin at all it takes the shape of scales. A fish is a water backboned animal. A backboned animal is called a vertebrate. A fish is therefore a water-vertebrate. There were fishes before there were any other kind of vertebrates. They have been on the earth longer than birds or beasts or reptiles. They came first, and we have good reason to believe that the fishes are the ancestors of all the others. But when the forefathers of the land animals found means of keeping alive on the land, so many new opportunities opened out to them and they found so much variety in their surroundings, that they throve and spread amazingly. And there came to be many kinds of them, of many forms, while the rest of the tribe kept in the water and stayed fishes. <table class="sp2 mc w50" title="COMMON SUNFISH."> <tbody> <tr> <td colspan="3"> <ANTIMG style="width:100%" src="images/i_036.jpg" alt="" /> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="xx-smaller ac w30"></td> <td class="x-smaller ac w40">Life-size.</td> <td class="xx-smaller ac w30">COPYRIGHT 1900, BY A. W. MUMFORD, CHICAGO.</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> And there was always a host of these, and nearly all of them had fishes for their food. So they fought for food and fought for place. Those who could swim fastest got away from the rest, and those who could move quickest got the most to [Pg 17] eat. Those with the longest teeth were present at the most meals, and those with the biggest mouths dined with them. And some escaped because they had hard, bony scales, too tough to crack. Some were covered over with thorns, and some had spines in their fins, which they set erect when their enemies would swallow them. And some had poison in their spines and benumbed their enemies, and some gave them electric shocks. Some hid in crevices of rock, or bored holes in the mud, and lay there with their noses and their beady eyes peeping out. Some crawled into dead shells. Some stretched their slim, ribbon-like bodies out in the hanging sea-weed. Some fled into caves, whither no one followed them, and where they lay hid for a whole geological age, until, seeing nothing, they had all gone blind. And some went down into the depths of the sea—two miles, three miles, five miles—I have helped haul them up to the light—and these went blind like the others, for the depths of the sea are black as ink and cold as ice. And even there they are not safe, for other fishes go down there to eat them. And some carry lanterns, large, shining spots on their heads or bodies, sometimes like the head-light of an engine. And with these flashing lanterns, these burglars of the deep hunt their prey. And these are hunted by others fish-hungry, too, who lurk in the dark and swallow them, lanterns, head-light and all! And so, with all this eating and chasing and fighting and fleeing and hiding and lurking, it comes about that wherever there is decent water on land or sea there are fishes to match it. And every part of every fish is made expressly for the life the fish has to lead. If any kind failed to meet requirements, other fishes would devour and destroy it. So only the fit can survive and these people the water after their kind. All kinds of fishes are good to eat except a few which are too tough, a few which are bitter, and a few that feed on poisonous things about the coral reefs and so become poisonous themselves. Some are insipid, some full of small bones and some are too lean or too small to tempt anybody, unless it be another fish. But this is their business, not ours, and they have flesh enough for the things they have to do. The biggest fish is the great basking shark, which grows to be thirty-five feet long, and lies on the surface of the sea, like a huge saw-log, filling its great mouth with the little things that float along beside it. The smallest of all fishes lives in the everglades of Florida and the streams that run out of them. You can find them in the little brook that runs through Jacksonville. I have netted them there with a spread umbrella, which will serve when you cannot get a better dip-net. They are prettily barred with jet black on a greenish ground, and they belong to that group of top minnows to which Agassiz gave the name of heterandria. It is hard to say what is the highest fish—what is the one which has undergone the greatest modification of structure. Perhaps this place should be assigned to the sole, with its two eyes both on one side of the head, peering through the same socket, while the socket on the other side has no eye at all. Or perhaps we may place as highest some specialized form as the angler or the sargassum fish, which has the paired fins greatly developed almost like arms and legs, and which has a dorsal spine modified into a fishing rod, which has a bait at the end, hanging over the capacious mouth. Agassiz put the sharks higher than all these bony fishes because, while lower in most respects, the sharks have greater brain and greater power of muscle. Others again might give the highest place to the lung fishes, fishes of the tropical swamps, with lungs as well as gills, and which can breathe air after a fashion when the water is all gone. These are not high in themselves, but they are nearest the higher animals, especially interesting to us because from such creatures in the past all the frogs and salamanders, and through these all the beasts that bite, the birds that fly and the reptiles that crawl are descended. These are near the primitive fish stock, the ancestors of true fishes on the one hand and of the land vertebrates on the other. As such, they partake of the nature of both. More correctly, their descendants have divided their characters. Their land-progeny lost [Pg 18] the gills, scales and fins of the lung fishes, while their water descendants have lost their lungs, or rather the use of them, for the lung of the fish is generally a closed sac, called the air bladder. Sometimes it is only partly closed, and sometimes it is lost altogether. But while we may dispute about the highest fish, there is no doubt about the lowest one. This is the lancelet. It is of the size and shape of a toothpick, translucent, scaleless, and almost finless, burying itself in the sand on warm coasts, in almost every region. The lancelet has no real bone in it, just a line of soft tissue blocking out the space where the backbone ought to be. It has no skull, nor brain, nor eyes, nor jaws, nor heart, nor anything in particular—just transparent muscle, spinal cord, artery gills, stomach and ovaries, with a fringe of feelers about the slit we call the mouth. And even these organs are rather blocked out than developed, yet it is easy to see that the creature is a vertebrate in intention and therefore essentially a fish—a fish and a vertebrate reduced to their lowest terms. You can go fishing almost anywhere, but whether it is good to do it or not depends on your reasons for doing it. There are about three good reasons for going a-fishing, one indifferent one, and one that is wholly bad. One good reason is that you may learn to know fish. Isaac Walton tells us that "it is good luck to any man to be on the good side of the man that knows fish." This is true, but you cannot learn to know fish unless you go forth to find them. There are about 15,000 kinds of fish in the world; 4,000 of them in North America, north of Panama. Now no man knows them all, not even on one continent, though some have written books upon them. But the man who knows a large part of them has not only learned fish, but a host of other things as well. He calls to mind rosy-spotted trout of the Maine woods, and still rosier of many brooks of Unalaska. He has seen the blue parrot fishes of the Cuban reefs and the leaping grayling of the Gallatin and the Au Sable. He has tried the inconnu of the Mackenzie River and the tarpon of the Florida reefs. He knows the sparkling darters of the French Broad and the Swannanoa, the clear-skinned pescados blancos of the Chapala Lake and the pop-eyes and grenadiers of three miles drop of Bering Sea. Till you learn to know fish you cannot imagine what the water depths still have for you to know. The second good reason why you should go a-fishing is that you may know the places where fishes go. All the finest scenery is full of fish. The Fire-Hole Canyon, the Roaring River, the Agna Bonita, the Rio Blanco, de Orizaba, the creek of Captains Harbor, the Saranna, the Roanoke, the Restigouche, the Nipigon, and the lakes of the St. John, all these are good fishing water of their kind. So is the Rio Almendares, the Twin Lakes, and the Eagle River, the Sawtooth Mountains, the Venados Islands, the shores of Clipperton, the Pearl Islands, Dead Man's Reef, No Man's Land, and the sand reaches of San Diego, Santa Barbara, Pensacola, and Beaufort. If you know all these you know the rest of the United States, with Canada and Mexico as well. All this is a goodly country, which it is well for a good citizen to understand. If you go a-fishing to know the fish, the rest will be granted to you. And with all the rest you have filled your mind not only with pictures of plunging trout, of leaping muscallonge and diving barracuda, but you have enriched it with endless vistas of deep, green pools; of foamy cascades, flower-carpeted meadows, of dark pines and sunny pines, white birch and clinging vines and wallowing mangrove. You have "dominion over palm and pine," the only dominion there is, for your dominion doth not "speedily pass away." You know the crescent bay, with its white breakers, the rush of the eager waters through the tide-worn estuary, the clinging fucus on the rocks at low-tide, the bark of sea wolves, and the roar of sea lions in the long lines of swaying kelp which reach far out into the farthest sea. This is good for you to know, for it is an antidote to selfishness and doubt and care. Then, too, it is good to know the men that live in the open where the fishes are. To shake their hands and share their hospitality will cure you of pessimism and distrust of democracy, and banish all the chimeras and goblins which [Pg 19] vex those who live too long in cities. To hear the elk's whistle and the ouzel's call, the whirr of the grouse's wings and the rush of the water in the canyon, will get out of your brain the shriek of cable cars, the rattle of the elevated railway, and all the unwholesome jangle of men who meet to make money. So there is a third reason for going a-fishing—not so good as the first two, but still very noble. We may fish for rest or exercise, which is but another form of rest. We may fish placidly in the placid brooks as Walton did, for chub and dace, till our thoughts flow as placidly as the Charles, or the Suwanee, or the Thames. Or we may fish in the rush and roar of the Des Chutes or the Buttermilk, tramping high through the pines to Agua Bonita, or far across the desert to Trapper's Lake, or struggling through the wooded reaches to the Saranac. We may come back at night tired enough to lie flat on the floor and "drip off the edges" of it, but withal at peace with all the world—it matters not whether we have fish or not. There is one reason for fishing which is wholly indifferent—that is to go a-fishing for the meat which is in the fish. This is pan-fishing or pot-fishing. If you get your living by it, that is your business. It is frequently an honest business. But it is not a matter of pride. If you caught a hundred trout in the Au Sable and ate them all you were fortunate. They helped out your store of provisions, and trout are very fair eating when properly fried. But don't brag about it. It interests the rest of us no more than if you boasted of catching ten frogs, or eating a hundred chickens in a hundred consecutive days. The matter of fish as food belongs to economics or some other dismal science. By eating trout or bass you can never get "on the good side of the man who knows fish." There remains one reason for going fishing which is positively horribly, disgustingly bad—that is, to see how many fish you can catch, just for numbers' sake. This is called "hog fishing," and whether your purpose be to brag over the size of your basket or to lie about the catch, or both, it is bad—bad for the fish, bad for the rivers, bad for your neighbors, bad for you. The good man will never slay fish wantonly. We creatures of God on the earth together should enjoy each other, and the beautiful world, which is ours alike. Because man is the wisest of all, with greatest power of knowledge and capacity for happiness, it is all the more incumbent on him to preserve the world as fair as he found it, and to respect the rights so far as may be of every other man and beast. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_043.jpg" alt="" /></div> [Pg 20] <h2 style="margin-bottom:2em;">WATER</h2> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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