The winners in life's race

by Arabella B. Buckley

And now, before we leave the shore, we must glance at a curious weakly little fellow clinging by his curly tail to the seaweed, whom you will certainly not take for a fish, even if you can find him out, so entangled is he generally in weeds of the same colour as himself. Yet the Sea-horse[49] is a true fish, covered not with scales but with plates, with which he makes a clicking noise by scraping them together. What look like large ears are really his arm-fins, while at the end of his long snout is a mouth shaped like an ordinary fish’s mouth, but toothless, and he breathes with fish’s gills arranged in round tufts instead of folds. What the use of his strange shape is to him we cannot tell, but at any rate his fleshless bony body must protect him from other fish, while his power of clinging causes him to be often carried by floating weed even into the open ocean, and make up for his feeble powers. In one thing he surpasses most other fishes, for he is a most careful father, carrying the mother’s eggs in a little pouch under his body till the young ones escape. There is one form of these sea-horses in tropical seas which has long red fringes floating from its body, so that it cannot be distinguished from the seaweed in which it hides.

So we see that the deep sea, the open sea, and the shore, are filled so full of different forms that there are enough not only to make use of every part, but also to provide food for each other, and we also see that by far the larger number even of widely-spread fish come near to the shore to leave their spawn, while the young ones often make their way into the brackish water at the mouths of rivers, and spend their youth in the shelter of the still fresh water.

Now it is very natural that many such fish should learn to remain in this quiet refuge, and in time to live there altogether. And because fish-life in the rivers is comparatively uneventful and little varied, we find much fewer peculiarities in river-fish. Many of them are very near relations of sea forms. There is the salmon, a true sea-fish, which wanders up the river to spawn in the pebbly shallows; and there are the trout, his near relations, which have learned to live entirely in the rivers. There are the sea-perches, large strong fish, and the smaller river perch, which have made their homes very successfully in the rivers, for their spines are so sharp that even the greedy pike hesitates to swallow them. There are the sea-sticklebacks, and the little river-stickleback.[50] This last is a very clever little fish, which hollows out the foundation of his nest very carefully in the bed of the river, and then builds it up for several inches with blades of grass and weeds ([Fig. 14]), gumming them together with the slime of his body. Then, when all is ready, he swims about to drive and coax the mother to the nest, sending her in to lay her eggs, and then driving her right through and out at the other side, so that a stream of water flows constantly over the eggs till they are hatched. Nay, his care does not end here, for when the young fish come out of the egg with a bag of yelk hanging under the body, as all young fish have at first, and so cannot swim easily and escape their enemies, the courageous little father will defend them and fight fiercely with any fish which thinks to make a meal upon them, not leaving them till all the yelk is absorbed, and they are able to swim and feed themselves.

Fig. 14.

STICKLEBACKS AND THEIR NEST. (Gasterosteus aculeatus.)

Besides these active river-fish there are the little stupid Miller’s Thumbs,[51] hiding under the stones to feed on tiny animals; they are feeble relations of the gurnards which we saw walking on the bottom of the sea. Then there are the purely freshwater fish, the Pike and the large Carp family, with its many branches, the Roach, and Dace, and Gudgeon, and Minnow; and the enormous family of Cat-fish and Sheat-fish,[52] of which we have none in England, but plenty in America and other parts of the world, a family in which the fathers sometimes carry the eggs in their mouths till hatched. And last but not least among the freshwater forms is that irrepressible family of the Eels which we saw wandering in the deep sea, and which are also to be found near the shores all over the world. These fish will even travel through pipes and into cisterns; and will climb up trees so as to drop into neighbouring streams and continue their wanderings; they sleep in the mud in winter; and even after being frozen come to life again; and in the spring they go to the sea to spawn, giving rise to those shoals of young ones from three to five inches long which come in incredible numbers up the rivers in summer, making the eel-fairs,[53]—

“The silver eel, in shining volumes rolled,”

so much spoken of in old books, when the eels will often climb high banks, nay, even pass over miles of dry land, closing down their narrow gill-openings, and so shutting in water to serve them as they go.

All these, and many other freshwater families, show us how the fish have wandered into every possible nook of the waters, so that even in those inland salt lakes of North America and Asia into which no rivers flow fish-life is abundant; and we can only suppose that the eggs must have been carried by water-birds in their flight, or by gusts of wind, or have arrived there in ages long ago, before these lakes were cut off from the rest of the watery world.