getting entangled in the fishermen’s nets and badly damaging them in its struggles to escape, so that the fishermen regard it as a nuisance, and have to handle it with care in order to avoid the serious injury that might be inflicted by a lateral sweep of a big fish’s saw.
A Horse-mackerel, or Great Tunny, chasing Menhaden.
(The great tunny is about fifteen feet in length when full-grown.)
The valuable mackerel family has one member which easily ranks first in size among the “bony fishes,” as distinguished from the sharks, rays, sturgeons, etc., which have gristly skeletons; this is the horse-mackerel, or great tunny (Thunnus thynnus), whose range encircles the globe, and which is an object of fisheries in many countries, notably southern Europe. Built on the compact and graceful lines of our common mackerel, it excels in speed, alertness, and vigor among the fishes of the high seas, and might very easily make a trip across the ocean in one third the time of our fastest steamships. It preys on all kinds of small fish, and is often seen playing havoc among schools of luckless herring and menhaden, Fifteen feet is about its maximum length, and fifteen hundred pounds its estimated maximum weight, although it is likely that this weight is considerably exceeded. Thirty tunnies harpooned by one fisherman during a single season weighed upward of thirty thousand pounds. A mutilated specimen ten feet long was found by the writer on the coast of Massachusetts; its head weighed two hundred and eighty-two pounds; its carcass about twelve hundred pounds.
Giant Rays, or Devil-fishes.
(They are about twenty-five feet long when full-grown.)Among the rays are several members which reach colossal proportions, The largest and best known of these is the so-called “devil-fish” (Manta birostris) of our South Atlantic coast and the tropical waters of America. It occasionally strays as far north as Cape May, and is common south of Cape Hatteras. It is shaped like a butterfly or bat, and has been called the “ocean vampire.” Projecting from either side of the head is a horn-like appendage, which, in reality, is a detached part of the pectoral fin, or “wing”; these horns, to which the name “devil-fish” owes its origin, are sometimes three feet long, and are movable, being used for bringing food to the mouth. Many years ago, the pursuit of this fish was a favorite pastime of the Carolina planters; and William Elliott, in his “Carolina Sports by Land and Water,” says: “Imagine a monster from sixteen to twenty feet across the back,
