REPORT OF COMMISSIONERS OF INLAND FISHERIES. 13 



individuals of the species, protection of the eggs and young is quite 

 as effective as great productivity. The crawfish, which produces 

 perhaps one hundred fry and protects them, maintained its numbers 

 as well as the lobster which produces two hundred times as many and 

 does not protect them. The dogfish, which produces not more than 

 eight or ten young in a season, but protects these until they are nearly 

 a foot long, has a reproductive power, or "germ fertility, " equal to 

 that of many species of fishes which produce a thousand times more 

 fry and leave them unprotected. Examples of this simple biological 

 fact could be multiplied by the hundred and extended through all 

 classes of marine animals. The number of eggs is not an index of 

 the abundance of a species, and a few individuals which by means 

 of natural or artificial protection or by sheer good luck have got past 

 the exceedingly critical early stages are often worth myriads of free- 

 swimming larvae. It would seem, then, that energy could be more 

 effectually expended in protecting the fry and the partially grown 

 young than in increasing the number of eggs. Another fact which 

 rtiilitates against the proposition in question is that in proportion as 

 the large lobsters are excluded from the market the demand for young 

 lobsters must increase. 



The following paper, already referred to in this report, by Professor 

 Ehrenbaum of the German Fisheries Association, is introduced as 

 giving an interesting and impartial statement of the lobster-culture 

 problem from the point of view of an outsider. The last part of the 

 paper, dealing with the rate of growth of the lobster, is omitted, as 

 are also the figures and their description. 



