Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 October 1885 — Tile Fish. [ARTICLE]

Tile Fish.

Rather more than five years ago, one of the vessels employed by the United States Fish Commission dredged up from the depths of the ocean, about one hundred miles east of Cape Hatteras, specimens of a fish which had never been seen before. The discoverers called it the tile fish, from its extraordinary shape. Until quite lately other deep-sea dredgers ip the same neighborhood have frequently found the fish; but it appears that since the beginning of the present year the species has, in some way, been destroyed. In the early summer, scorces of ships arriving in New England ports from the South brought news that the surface of the sea over an immense area off Cape Hatteras was covered with dead fish of an uncommon variety. Investigation proved that the defunct were tile fish, and ever since, although the tile fish has been repeatedly dredged for in its old haunts, not a single specimen has been brought up. Prof. Baird, who has already pointed out that there are many deep-sea fish that cannot survive a variation of four or five degrees of temperature in the waters they inhabit, is of the opinion that a cold current must have penetrated the domain of the unfortunate tile fish, and thus caused the apparent extinction of the race.