This handsome little stickleback, though smaller in size than his brethren, is vastly more abundant. Sir J. Richardson speaks of it ‘as being common in the Saskatchawan, ranging as far north as the 65th parallel.’ So abundant are they in the lakes and pools about Cumberland House, east of the Rocky Mountains, that sledge-loads are dipped out with wooden bowls, and used for feeding the dogs. I have seen cartloads of these tiny fish in a single pool, left by the receding waters after the summer floods, on the Sumass prairie and banks of the Chilukweyuk river. As the water rapidly evaporated, the miserable captives huddled closer and closer together, starving with hunger and panting for air, but without the remotest chance of escape. The sticklebacks die and decompose, or yield banquets to the bears, weasels, birds, and beetles; the pool dries, and in a few weeks not a trace or record remains of the dead host of fishes. In the smaller streams, a bowl dipped into the water where the sticklebacks were thickest, could be readily filled with fish.
Sticklebacks are the most voracious little gourmands imaginable, devourers of everything, and cannibals into the bargain; tearing their wounded comrades into fragments, they greedily swallow them. I have often taken this species (_G. concinnus_) in Esquimalt Harbour, where they are very plentiful during the winter months. The natives of Kamtschatka make use of a stickleback (_G. obolarius_), which they obtain in great quantities, not only as food for the sledge-dogs, but for themselves also, by making them into a kind of soup. West of the Rocky Mountains I have never seen the Indians use them as an article of diet, not from any dislike to the fish, but simply because there are larger and better fishes quite as abundant, and as easily procurable. Whether there are any species in the North-west, strictly marine, building their nests in the sea and never entering fresh-water, I am unable to say.
The Fifteen-spine Stickleback (_Gasterosteus spinachia_) is along our own coasts strictly a tenant of the ocean, and makes a nest of seaweeds glued together with an adhesive mucus, in the same way as the nests of our little friends are cemented, that seek as their nursery the clear cold streams of British Columbia, Oregon, and Vancouver Island.