Elementary Zoology, Second EditionKellogg, Vernon L. (Vernon Lyman)
Science
Elementary Zoology, Second Edition
Kellogg, Vernon L. (Vernon Lyman)
Animals; Zoology
Many species (cling fishes) attach themselves to the rocks by a fleshy
sucking-disk. Some (_Remora_) (fig. 118) cling to larger fishes by a
strange sucking-disk on the head, a transformed dorsal fin, being thus
shielded from the attacks of fish smaller than their protectors. Some
small fishes seek the shelter of the floating jellyfishes, lurking
among their poisoned tentacles. Others creep into the masses of
floating gulf-weed. Some creep into the shell of clams and snails. In
the open channel of a sponge, the mouth of a tunicate and in similar
cavities of various animals, little fishes may be found. A few fishes
(hag-fishes) are parasitic on others, boring their way into the body
and devouring the muscles with their rasp-like teeth.
Some fishes are provided with peculiar modifications of the gills
which enable them to breathe for a time out of water. Such fish have
the pectoral fins modified for a rather poor kind of locomotion on
land, thus enabling them to move from pond to pond or from stream to
stream. In cold climates the fishes must either migrate to warmer
latitudes in winter, as some do, or withstand variously the cold,
often freezing weather. Some fish can be frozen solid, and yet thaw
out and resume active living. Some lie at the bottoms of deep pools
through the colder periods, while many others, such as the minnows,
chubs, and other kinds common in small streams, bury themselves in the
mud, and lie dormant or asleep through the whole winter. On the other
hand in countries where the long intense rainless summers dry up the
pools, some fishes have the habit of burying themselves in the mud,
which, with slime from the body, forms about them a sort of tight
cement ball in which they lie dormant until the rains come. "Thus a
lung-fish (called _Protopterus_), found in Asia and Africa, so
completely slimes a ball of mud around it that it may live for more
than one season, perhaps many; it has been dug up and sent to England,
still enclosed in its round mud-case, and when it was placed in warm
water it awoke as well as ever."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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