6 History of Fish Management 



relationship between water temperatures and the rate of food digestion 

 in largemouth bass. Thompson *^ tagged fish and studied their migration 

 in rivers. 



Several early pond studies gave promise of things to come, such as 

 that of Dyche ^^ who observed that interspecific predation between large- 

 mouth bass and bluegills might favor bluegills rather than bass. Barney 

 and Canfield^ studied the fish production of an 0.22-acre pond over a 

 period of 5 years and gathered some evidence that production and total 

 standing crop were related to the lengths of the food chains of the fishes 

 introduced. The first record of the use of tlie bass-bluegill combination 

 was published in 1902.^^ Barney and Canfield^ used largemouth bass, 

 crappies, and bluegills, or bluegills alone prior to 1922. 



A comprehensive inventory of current thinking on fishery management 

 in 1938 was given by Carl L. Hubbs and R. W. Eschmeyer in their book, 

 "The Improvement of Lakes for Fishing." -- Dr. Hubbs, then head of the 

 Michigan Institute for Fishery Research, and Dr. Eschmeyer, one of his 

 students recognized for his independent thinking, pooled their experiences 

 and hypotheses and built, with a strong assist from Leopold's concepts 

 of game management, a thesis that populations of fish in lakes could be 

 managed also. Actually, they had very little to go on, but they held with 

 the assumption that if game habitat could be improved by the addition 

 of cover on land, fish habitat must be deficient of cover under water and 

 could be improved in the same manner. So the book begins with a section 

 on improving cover, based on the theory that such cover was one of the 

 larger needs. 



Other subjects discussed were Managing Plant Growths, Bettering 

 Spawning Conditions, Regulating the Fluctuations of Water Levels, Pre- 

 venting Erosion and Silting, and many more. Under the topic Handling 

 Populations with Stunted Growth, the authors suggest that one might 

 do the following: (1) increase food (however, without suggestions as to 

 how to go about it ) , ( 2 ) avoid overstocking, and ( 3 ) reduce the popula- 

 tion by liberalizing size limits, season limits, and bag limits, as well as 

 by destroying nests, by planting fish-eating game fishes and, as a last 

 resort, by killing the entire population as Dr. Eschmeyer had already 

 done at the time the book was published. In all, there were 20 types of 

 fish-management practices described, none of which had yet been care- 

 fully tested. 



Evidence that the authors were still affected by the earlier beliefs and 

 operations is to be found under the subject Place of Lake Improvement in 

 Fish Management: 



"At least for the near future, lake improvement cannot be foreseen as 

 a substitute for the long-recognized practices in fish management [re- 

 strictive and protective legislation, law enforcement, and the introduction 



