More on the affection of other fish towards their young and loyalty to their own species

THE fish called abren keeps its young safe in its belly if they are born during a storm at sea, and when the weather is calm again she vomits them up. ¹ The galalca, according to Albertus in Bk XXIV of his work On Animals, is a sea-creature which, on feeling the embryo alive in her womb, draws it out and suckles it; but if, after it is taken out, she finds it immature, she replaces it in her womb and nourishes it there till it is ready and fully-formed. ² The electric ray, as Pliny says in Bk IX, Ch. 51, has been found with eighty young; she produces within herself very soft eggs, which she shifts to a different part of her womb, and there emits them; the eggs are produced at about the equinox. ³ There is a fish shaped like a tortoise, of which Peter Martyr, in Bk 8 of Decade III of The Supposed Continent, tells us amazingly that, though it is a monster, it has such a wonderful devotion to man that now and again it allows itself to be caught. On the other hand, at the beginning of the same book, he describes a fish in the Caspian Sea similar to a shark, which will rip a man with its teeth and devour him. ⁴