Butterfly Cloud

Northern Californians rubbed their eyes last week as Lake Tahoe turned orange. In Lassen National Park motorists cursed their overheated engines. Visitors to American River Canyon looked aloft, beheld a vast mottled cloud moving northwest. Natives of the Sierra Nevada foothills, remembering similar phenomena in 1926, 1919 and 1913, shrugged their shoulders and went back to work. They knew that these butterflies live off wild lilacs and other wild plants, do not harm domestic crops.

California's butterfly horde left the high Sierras two months ago, began moving northward toward the Sacramento Valley. Traveling 20 m. p. h. it moved for a few hours, then stopped, dispersed, later gathered again for a fresh trip. Last week it was near the end of its migration, for California tortoise shell butterflies seldom seek the lowlands.

The California tortoise shell (Aglais californica) has several black spots on its tawny wings. It is a member of the Nymphalidae, largest family of butterflies, which contains over 5,000 species. They are great travelers, but unlike some of their cousins, tortoise shells migrate only at intervals of six or seven years. Migrations may be in any direction in which there is food. Usually only a small portion of the butterflies in a region join a migration. Those who leave do not return.

Goldfish Man

P: At Yale University Dr. George Milton Smith turned goldfish brown with x-rays, suspected that he had brought to the surface the same pigment which turns human tissue brown in certain forms of cancer

P: At San Quentin. Calif., two doctors fed goldfish beef muscle, fed other goldfish ground-up ram gonads. discovered that gonad feeding discouraged goldfish obesity.

P: At Washington, D. C., the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries was holding a goldfish exhibition.

P: At his Rapidan, Va., summer camp President Hoover enjoyed the sight of 200 goldfish sporting in a pool.

These and other recent items of goldfish news were of special interest to a dark mustached little Japanese named Roy Nakashima as he went about his business of raising goldfish in Missouri's Ozark Mountains last week. Fish culturist of Ozark Fisheries. Inc.. Roy Nakashima last year raised and sold more than 500,000 goldfish. This year he expects to sell a million. Chief reason : Depression.

Eight years ago Dentist Charles Arthur Furrow started a rainbow trout fishing club at Bennett Springs. Mo. Two years later he sold the club to the State and with Oilman Frederick Lawrence Bailliere of Tulsa, Okla. bought a new site nine miles northeast of Stoutland on which they began raising rainbow trout commercially. Trout raising proved unprofitable, so they decided to raise goldfish and went in search of a goldfish expert.

The late Chancellor David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, world-famed ichthyologist, found one for them. Roy Nakashima is an M. F. H.* from the Imperial Institute of Tokyo. He spent 20 years studying fish, two of them under Chancellor Jordan at Stanford. He went to Japan, returned with a stock of goldfish which he distributed about the 80 pools of Messrs. Furrow & Bailliere's Ozark Hatcheries. He introduced scientific methods for the control of protozoa flukes, fungi and other aquatic organisms, soon had a fast growing community of strong, healthy goldfish.

Fish Master Nakashima raises many varieties of goldfish. Prices range from $2.50 per 100 for small common goldfish to $25 each for rare veil-tails and fringe-tails. Other varieties: comets (slightly larger and fancier than common goldfish), wakins (Japan's common goldfish, new in the U. S.), shubunkins, black moors (a black Chinese fish with big popeyes), calico fantails (mottled blue & red, with long, flowing tails). Ozark Fisheries also sell tadpoles, Japanese snails, baby turtles, fish food, water plants.

Goldfish spawning time begins in March, lasts three or four months. Females produce from 3.000 to 5,000 eggs a year, from which Roy Nakashima raises 500 to 1,000 fish. Eggs are spawned in moss & water. Ten days later the fish are put into separate pools, where they grow during the summer. Young goldfish are brown. In the autumn they are big & bright enough to be sold. They are bailed out of the ponds, sorted in troughs, placed in cans for shipment. During the trip the water in their cans is changed every eight hours. Ozark goldfish have stocked President Hoover's Rapidan camp (choicest varieties were kept in the White House), the Woolaroc ranch of Oilman Frank Phillips, the Bureau of Fisheries' aquarium exhibition. Fish Master Nakashima does not raise his goldfish for scientific experiments, but some of them may find their way into laboratories.

Roy Nakashima lives & talks goldfish 51 weeks a year. During the other week he watches the World Series baseball games, cheers diffidently for St. Louis when St. Louis is represented. He is in his late 30's. At work he wears rubber knee boots and a huge straw hat. He has found that the goldfish business booms with Depression because goldfish are a cheap form of amusement. He is now experimenting with diets to determine how much influence feeding has on the color and marking of the fish. Next winter he will go to Japan to seek new and strange varieties of goldfish for U. S. bowls.

Again, Ogopogo

"Ooooh! The Ogopogo!" cried a woman tennis player, pointing her racquet at Okanagan Lake. And again, last week, news readers throughout the land were reminded of British Columbia's fabulous lake-serpent. A gentle monster, 30 ft. long, "with the face of a sheep, the head of a bulldog, four flippers and vegetarian habits," the Ogopogo has appeared in Okanagan Lake every summer for the past six years. Usually it is sighted by a newshawk.

Like Lewis Carroll's Snark and several other mythical animals, the Ogopogo was first heard of in London. Some seven years ago in a musical show, Co-optimists, Jessie Matthews sang:

I'm looking for the Ogopogo,

The funny little Ogopogo--

His mother was an earwig,

His father was a whale--

I want to put a little bit of salt on his tail.

Two years later touring members of the Vancouver Board of Trade were guests of the Vernon, B. C., Rotary Club. Someone sang the Ogopogo song, the Rotarians picked it up, went Ogopogo hunting. But long before that Indians had seen the mysterious lake-serpent. Most likely explanation is that the Ogopogo is a mother otter followed by her pups swimming in tandem.

* Master of Fish Husbandry--not to be confused with the more familiar Master of Fox Hounds.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.