Fig. 219.—Sergeant-fish, Rachycentron canadum (Linnæus). Virginia.
Rachycentron canadum, called cobia, crab-eater, snooks, or sergeant-fish, reaches a length of about five feet. The last name is supposed to allude to the black stripe along its side, like the stripe on a sergeant's trousers. It is rather common in summer along our Atlantic coast as far as Cape Cod, especially in Chesapeake Bay. Rachycentron pondicerrianum, equally voracious, extends its summer depredations as far as Japan. The more familiar name for these fishes, Elacate, is of later date than Rachycentron.
Mr. Prime thus speaks of the crab-eater as a game-fish:
"In shape he may be roughly likened to the great northern pike, with a similar head, flattened on the forehead. He is dark green on the back, growing lighter on the sides, but the distinguishing characteristic is a broad, dark collar over the neck, from which two black stripes or straps, parting on the shoulders, extend, one on each side, to the tail. He looks as if harnessed with a pair of traces, and his behavior on a fly-rod is that of a wild horse. The first one that I struck, in the brackish water of Hillsborough River at Tampa, gave me a hitherto unknown sensation. The tremendous rush was not unfamiliar, but when the fierce fellow took the top of the water and went along lashing it with his tail, swift as a bullet, then descended, and with a short, sharp, electric shock left the line to come home free, I was for an instant confounded. It was all over in ten seconds. Nearly every fish that I struck after this behaved in the same way, and after I had got 'the hang of them' I took a great many."
The Butter-fishes: Stromateidæ.—The butter-fishes (Stromateidæ) form a large group of small fishes with short, compressed bodies, smooth scales, feeble spines, the vertebræ in increased number and especially characterized by the presence of a series of tooth-like processes in the œsophagus behind the pharyngeals. The ventral fins present in the young are often lost in the process of development.
According to Mr. Regan, the pelvic bones are very loosely attached to the shoulder-girdle as in the extinct genera Platycormus and Homosoma. This is perhaps a primitive feature, indicating the line of descent of these fishes from berycoid forms.
We unite with the Stromateidæ the groups or families of Centrolophidæ and Nomeidæ, knowing no characters by which to separate them.
Stromateus fiatola, the fiatola of the Italian fishermen, is an excellent food-fish of the Mediterranean. Poronotus triacanthus, the harvest-fish, or dollar-fish, of our Atlantic coast, is a common little silvery fish six to ten inches, as bright and almost as round as a dollar. Its tender oily flesh has an excellent flavor. Very similar to it is the poppy-fish (Palometa simillima) of the sandy shores of California, miscalled the "California pampano," valued by the San Francisco epicure, who pays large prices for it supposing it to be pampano, although admitting that the pampano in New Orleans has firmer flesh and better flavor. The harvest-fish, Peprilus paru, frequently taken on our Atlantic coast, is known by its very high fins. Stromateoides argenteus, a much larger fish than any of these, is a very important species on the coasts of China.
