SOME AGED FISH.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2928, 25 July 1911, Page 7

SOME AGED FISH.

! It. is not generally known that thero is hardly any limit to the age of a fish. Professor Baird, of the United States Fish Commission, is the authority for the statement that there is authentic evidence to show that car;) have attained an age of two hundred years. Professor Baird also pays that thero is a tradition that within fifty years a pike was living in Russia whose age dated back to the fifteenth century. "There is nothing," hj" savs, "to prevent a fish from living almost indefinitely, and it has no period of maturity. "There are gold-fish in Washington that have belcngeel to one family for over fifty years. r lhey do not appear to be much larger than when they were originally placed in the aquarium, and are every lit as lively as they were v.h r n young. There are so many fish stories in circulation that the ordirary reader has almost made up his mind that fish and truth do not go together." Probably some persons will doubt what is said by Professor Baird about the age a fish can attain. If they elo, they are simply doubting the best-known authority on fish. The Russian Minister says that in the Royal Aquarium in St: Petersburg there arc fish to-day that have been known by the records to have been in it 140 years. Some of them are, he says, over five times as large as they were when first captured, while others have not grown an inch in length. An attache of the Chinese Legation corroborates this statement. He rays there arc sacred fish kept in some of the palaces in China that are even older than any of those in Russia.