A FISH THAT WEAVES ITS NEST.
Mr. C. F. Holder, I hear, is to tell you in the June St. Nicholas about some fishes and their young, so this is a good time to show you this letter from my friend Ernest Ingersoll, concerning a fish that weaves its nest.
Dear Jack: Among the small fishes that inhabit the streams and ditches along the Atlantic coast of the Northern States, is the four-spined stickleback. Like the rest of the sticklebacks, this species makes a nest in which the eggs are deposited. The male fish makes the nest himself and defends it with great spirit. It is about half an inch high and three-eighths of an inch in thickness. It is composed of stalks of water-weeds and small stuff of that kind, bound together by a glutinous thread which the fish spins out from a gland in his body, and which is wound round and round the nest to bind it together. It frequently happens, however, that in poking apart the straws with his nose this living bobbin will pass his body through the nest and back again, thus weaving the thread he reels out into the substance of the nest and sewing it tightly together.
Yours truly,
Ernest Ingersoll.