284 BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 



currents scatter them, and when the time comes to settle down to steady habits they 

 are wide apart. Still, as the plantings made by me for the New York Fishery Com- 

 mission were all made at Cold Spring Harbor, on the south shore of Long Island 

 Sound, some 15 miles west of the middle of that body of water, the varying tides 

 would not take the little swimmers outside its limits, because the returning tide would 

 bring them back again. Therefore there is no doubt about the value of saving the 

 lobster eggs and planting them in the sound. Some New York lobsters may cross 

 the sound and be taken in Connecticut traps, just as New York salmon and shad are 

 taken by New Jersey fishermen, but that is not a thing to be considered seriously. 



A very natural question for a reader to ask at this point is: "Why don't you 

 retain the youthful lobster until it ceases to swim and settles down to crawling, and 

 thereby stock a certain district in which your State, that pays for the work, is inter- 

 ested f" To this I should reply that in theory that would be the proper and most 

 correct thing to do, but in practice we find that there is a factor that will not be left 

 out of our calculations, and this factor is cannibalism. 



There is, at present writing, no food for a larval lobster known to me that is as 

 acceptable as another larval lobster that has just molted. I have tried to bribe 

 them by hanging flesh of eel, clam, beef, lobster (adult), blue crab, and fiddler crab, 

 but without avail; their love for their fellows which prompted them to take their 

 brethren in out of the wet, lest they might be devoured by small fishes, baffled my 

 efforts, and there was no resource but to plant the fry as soon as hatched. If each 

 youngster could be placed in a tank or even a small compartment by itself, no doubt 

 it would accept any, or all, of the foods named, but at present we are not prepared to 

 feed a million or more individual lobsters in separate stalls for months before turning 

 them out to shift for themselves. They cannot be reclaimed from cannibalism by any 

 known means. They are fighters by nature, and when a lobsterinan has a lot of adults 

 in a floating car and a storm comes up each lobster blames his neighbor for any colli- 

 sion that may ensue and they engage in a general fight, which is not only disastrous 

 to themselves but to the lobsterman, for lobsters are not marketable in fragments. 



The size of marketable lobsters has been on the decrease for the past fifty years. 

 Half a century ago my father never brought home a lobster for family use under six 

 pounds, and it was often twice that weight. One under six pounds was not thought 

 worth picking the meat out of, for the labor is the same, no matter what the size; but 

 to-day a 2-pouud lobster is considered of good size, although an occasional "deep 

 sea" lobster of 20 pounds, or more, is seen on the stands. These usually have large 

 barnacles, oysters or other animals of good size attached to their shells, showing that 

 they have not molted in some years, and their claws are always bruised and blunted 

 as additional evidence that their armor has not been recently renewed. The taste for 

 "chicken" lobster has done much in recent years to kill off the young and to prevent 

 their attaining a larger size, but the canneries are credited with taking in all that 

 may be rejected by law. The State of New York had a law that no lobsters measuring 

 less than 10 J inches, exclusive of claws, should be sold. This excellent law was, I 

 believe, obtained by Mr. Eugene G. Blackford when he was president of the New 

 York Fishery Commission, but was repealed. 



That lobsters of 20 pounds weight have been taken within a few years I know, 

 for I have seen them weighed; but the monsters of twice that weight that we read of 

 are not well authenticated, and the story of the judge who, after the manner of 





