Early Attempts at Management 5 



during hot wcatlier. Yet, judging from \\ hat was pubhshed at that time, 

 there was no animosity between Professor Forbes and the State Fish 

 Commissioners. Perhaps the former reahzed that the Commission was 

 responding to the desires of the pul)hc. 



It is against this background tliat we can visuahze the important 

 place hatcheries held in the minds of fish culturists at that time. The 

 products of inland hatcheries were trout, salmon, whitefish, walleye, 

 largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, northern pike, muskellunge, and 

 several other species propagated for stocking in special locations. Since 

 hatchery operators were thoroughly convinced of the worth of their 

 product, they scarcely gave any thought to how fish managed to survive 

 before the hatchery was developed. 



Hatchery superintendents and fish- and game-department officials on 

 both state and federal levels exerted considerable ejffort to convince the 

 public that hatchery fish were needed to maintain populations of fish in 

 the face of advancing civilization— a drive which gave great impetus to 

 the hatchery movement. However, almost no eflFort was made to de- 

 termine the final disposition of hatchery fish or to estimate the importa nce 

 of the hatche ry produce on the basis of fish stocked per acre of wat er. 

 Since such questions were dangerous to the hatchery movement they 

 were simply avoided. Even so, it is interesting to note that the hatchery 

 movement was so successful that even today the otherwise uninformed 

 layman inquires about recent stocking of the waters in which he plans 

 to fish. In later sections of this book, we will see some of the important 

 ways the hatching of fish is useful in fish management. 



EARLY ATTEMPTS AT MANAGEMENT 



In spite of the fact that the artificial propagation of fish in hatcheries 

 continued to hold the center of the fisheries stage, some of the early 

 investigations were not directly related to artificial fish propagation. These 

 studies helped to pave the way for the modern concept of fish manage- 

 ment which is the subject of this book. Before 1759, Hederstrom -^ rec- 

 ognized rings of growth on the vertebrae of fishes as representing annuli; 

 later other biologists discovered the growth rings on the scales of fish, 

 but Borodin^ and Barney- were responsible for bringing a method of 

 aging fish from scales to the attention of fisheries workers. Wiebe ^^ and 

 C. Juday, et al.~^ w^ere among the first to do comprehensive experiments 

 with fertilizer materials in water and to measure the increase in plankton 

 resulting therefrom. Surber ^^ tested sodium arsenite as a chemical means 

 for the control of aquatic vegetation. The first electric fish shocker for 

 research purposes was developed by Burr.^^ Markus ^^ investigated the 



