Animals: 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

¶ 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

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

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

¶ 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.