25.-THE PROPAGATION OF BLACK BASS IN PONDS. 



BY WILLIAM F. PAGE, 



Superintendent U. S. Fish Commission Station at Neosho, Afissowt. 



About 1852 several gentlemen at private expense introduced the black bass into 

 the Potomac River by transferring the adult flsh from Wheeling Creek, West Virginia. 

 The wonderful multiplication and dissemination of these fish throughout the entire 

 Potomac basin attracted the attention of the various State fish commissions which 

 were created in the seventies, and in many States the effort was made to add to the 

 fish supply by broadening the habitat of the black bass. But while fish-culturists 

 were everywhere striving to perfect the methods and apparatus employed with the 

 salinonidte and shad, nowhere was any systematic effort being made toward the propa- 

 gation of the bass by artificial methods. Several reasons obtained for the apparent 

 neglect of this prince of fishes, among which may be mentioned the meagerness of the 

 appropriations for propagation; the fact that nearly all States, as well as the United 

 States, engaged in fish-culture were annually, at the period of the bass spawning, 

 devoting every energy toward the multiplication of the shad; and, above all, the fact 

 that the eggs of the black bass belonged to the class commonly called glutinous, a 

 class until recently considered impossible of treatment by artificial methods of impreg- 

 nation and incubation. 



In the light of late achievements in this direction, notably in the impregnation 

 and freeing of the eggs of the wall-eyed pike by Prof. Jacob E. Reighard, and the 

 successful hatching of the glutinous eggs of the white and yellow perch at the Central 

 Station of the U. S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, it is pertinent to ask if it was 

 not a hasty judgment which placed the artificial propagation of the black bass beyond 

 the pale of the possibilities. If I dared to express an opinion on this subject it would 

 be that a part of the effort which has been expended on fishes of less value would 

 place the secret in our hands. However, within the past decade the bass, by the 

 demands of its ardent friends, the anglers of the United States, has commenced to 

 attract and hold the attention of fish commissioners and fish-culturists. The U. S. 

 Commission of Fish and Fisheries has for several years been engaged in collecting 

 the adult fish from the overflow districts of Illinois and distributing them into new 

 and depleted waters, on the same plan, though on a larger scale, which proved so 

 successful in stocking the Potomac River. Not only this, but at the Neosho Station 

 an effort was inaugurated, not without success, in 1889, to propagate the young in 

 ponds. The fish commissioners of the State of Missouri have also been engaged for 

 some time in the propagation of the black bass in ponds at Forest Park, in St. Louis. 

 In the fourteenth report of the Wisconsin Fish Commission an earnest plea is presented 

 for the construction of a system of ponds to be devoted to bass culture. 



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