Body Covering 29 



least once before it goes to market or into the angler's 

 creel. 



Now, consider the California golden trout. This fish was 

 originally found in two small streams near Mount Whitney, 

 and nowhere else in the world. These two streams were 

 fantastically full of extremely beautiful and very hungry 

 little trout most of which matured before they were six inches 

 long, which is to say that they had spawned at least once be- 

 fore that time. A regulation fixing a minimum size of six 

 inches for golden trout seemed to serve the purpose. 



Later, the species was transplanted. It reached a high 

 barren lake not many miles away, and there, as is often the 

 case when trout are introduced into suitable waters unoccu- 

 pied by competing forms of life, it flourished mightily. It 

 grew to much greater size, reaching the not ignoble length 

 of fifteen inches. An examination of scales revealed two 

 things: that no fish in this lake laid eggs before it reached 

 the end of its third year of life, and that at the end of the 

 third year the fish averaged ten inches in length. A six-inch- 

 minimum regulation was, therefore, of not the slightest avail 

 in preventing the destruction of fish in this lake before they 

 had spawned once, but it was only by a study of scales that 

 this fact could be brought to light. 



It must not be thought that the fisheries worker pretends 

 that he can take any scale from any fish and recite its past 

 history therefrom. In some species the scales are inscrutable, 

 and reveal nothing even to the most careful searcher. And 

 in the species in which the scales are readable, individual 

 scales are often ambiguous in their indications. Some are 

 blurred, some are scarred, and still others are regenerated — 

 that is to say, they are replacements of the scales which first 

 occupied those positions on the fish and which have in some 

 way been lost. The number of regenerated scales varies with 

 the species, but in all cases such scales have a blank center, 



