108 Museum AND Art NOoTES

shoal of pilchards, herding them together and then dashing among them, scattering the
pilchards in headlong flight. Dogfish are very frequently captured; the blue shark,
about 6 feet long, is also netted. When the pilchards are crowded together in the
bunt, the last part of the net still in the water (or as it is technically called, “dried
up”), the blue sharks will hover round waiting to pick up any pilchard that escapes.
They do not, however, as a rule, tear the net. Dogfish will tear a hole in the net
to get at the imprisoned pilchards; they do so more especially after dark; they don’t
do much damage during daylight.

Herrings are rarely taken with the pilchards in the summer. When the herrings
come into the sound in the fall, mixed catches of herrings and pilchards may be got,
but the majority of the pilchards soon depart. Throughout the fall and winter some
pilchards stay in the inlet and a few are taken among the herrings. In the winter
it has happened, however, that distinct shoals of pilchards and herrings have been
met with. So that, if in the winter the pilchards are present in sufficient numbers,
they seem to tend to form a separate shoal. If, however, they are few in number,
they tend to join a herring shoal.

A fish that is not infrequently meshed in the pilchard net is the anchovy. The
anchovy occurs in certain of the inlets of Vancouver Island in great numbers, and
the writer has found the eggs there in the summer. The egg of the anchovy is
remarkable among floating fish eggs in being oval in shape, whereas most of the
pelagic fish eggs are spherical. It measures about one-twentieth of an inch in length.

Spring salmon and cohoes are not uncommonly captured with the pilchards.

Shad are occasionally found among the pilchards; they vary in size, being 6 to 14
inches in length. A small shad was mistaken by the finder for a menhaden and
reported as such. The menhaden is the source of an extensive fishery on the Atlantic
coast of the United States, but it does not occur in the Pacific.

A specimen of the Pacific saury, which Jordan and Evermann, describe as very
rare, has been taken in the pilchard net. The example illustrated was, through the
courtesy of Mr. W. Lord, sent by Mr. A. Park of Nootka.

There are three reasons why other fishes are captured with the pilchards. It
may happen that they are feeding along with the pilchards, or they may have asso-
ciated with the pilchard shoal temporarily for protection, or they may be enemies of
the pilchards and are captured while attacking them.

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