Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 February 1891 — Walking Fishes. [ARTICLE]

Walking Fishes.

It may seem absurd to speak of fishes as walking. The flying-fish is well known, but its flight looks much like swimming in the air. We naturally think of fishes as living all the time in water; as being incapable, in fact, of living anywhere else. But nature maintains.no hard and fast lines of distinction betweeh animal life which belongs on the land and that which belongs to the water. If we can believe the accounts of naturalists and there are no grounds for doubting them—there are fishes that traverse dry land and others that walk on the bottom of the sea. It is reported that Dr Francis Day, of India, lias collected several instances of the migration of fishes by land from* one piece of water to another. Bayard once met some perch-like fishes traveling along a hot and dusty gravel road at midday. Humboldt saw a species of dorus leaping over the dry ground, supported by its pectoral fins; and lie was told of another specimen that had climbed a hillock over twenty feet in height. A French naturalist published in the “Transactions of the Linnaan Society of Normandy,” 1842, an account of his observations on the ambulatory movements of the gurnard at the bottom of the sea. He observed these movements in one of the artificial sea-ponds or fishing-traps, surrounded by nets, on the chore of Normandy. He saw a score of gurnards c’ose their fins against their sides like the wings of a fly in repose, and, without any movement of their tails, walk %Jong tho bottom by means of six free rays, three on each pectoral fin, which they placed successively on the ground. They moved rapidly forward and backward, to the right and left, groping in all directions with these rays, as if in search of small crabs. Their great heads and bodies seemed *to throw hardly any weight on the slender rays, or feet, being suspended in water, and having their weight further diminished by their swimming bladders. When the naturalist moved in the water the fish swam away rapidly to the extremity of the pond; wheD he stood still they resumed their v alking and came between bis legs. On dissection the three anterior rays on each pectoral fin are found to be supported each with a strong muscular apparatus to direct its movements, apart from the muscles that are connected with the smaller rays of the pectoral fin.