In some remarkable and incomprehensible manner the good old name of Pike has fallen into disuse, and is now applied in this country to a fish that is not a pike at all, but a perch, Lucio perca, the Pike Perch, Big-eyed Pike, or Glass Eye of the Lakes; while the name Pickerel, which is merely the diminutive of Pike, is appropriated to the most gigantic and ferocious monsters of the deep. There is no fish whose appearance is more appalling, and whose appetite is more ravenous than the Great Northern Pickerel, which is alleged to attain a weight of twenty pounds, and which, in its fury, will pounce upon and swallow almost any small moving object. Nor does it much surpass the common pickerel of our ponds, which has very similar habits, and sometimes weighs as high as ten pounds.
The pickerel family, like most of the fish of America, have never been properly classified by the scientific, nor named by the vulgar. In fact, they, with the exception of the mascallonge, appear to have no specific names in common parlance, while naturalists have vague or no acquaintance with their peculiarities. Sportsmen and others speak of catching pickerel, whether it be in the St. Lawrence, Great Northern Pickerel, which seem to
NORTHERN PICKEREL—Esox lucioides.
THE PICKEREL—Esox reticulatus.
have had no scientific designation till named by Agassiz Esox Lucioides or on Long Island, Esox Fasciatus, or on our principal inland waters, Esox Reticulatus, or in some of the lakes of the Eastern States, where a fish is caught, of which Dr. De Kay, in his “Natural History of New York,” doubts the existence, and which Dr. Mitchill has dubbed the Federation Pike, Esox Tredecemradiatus. In truth, the distinction between the Mascallonge and the Great Northern Pickerel is scarcely visible even to the eye of science, and to the unlearned is marked only by a slight difference in the shape of the head and the coloring of the sides. The light tint is yellow in the pickerel and white in the mascallonge, while in the latter at times the sides have dark spots on a white ground instead of the dark network of the pickerel. It has even been doubted whether these fish are not identical, and the differences of size and color produced by local habits; but the views of all practical fishermen lean the other way, and they can at once distinguish the smallest mascallonge from the largest pickerel, although they are unable to point out the precise distinctive characteristics; while scientific men do make out that there is a difference in the number of the fin-rays. For the latter, however, although I have given the most careful attention that could be expected from an amateur, my enumeration differs from that of all others as they differ among themselves. My computation of the fin-rays gave—
Dorsal 18; Pectoral 16; Ventral 11; Anal 17; Caudal 24.
While according to Dr. Mitchill they were respectively, D. 21; P. 14; V. 11; A. 17; C. 26.