34 OYSTER CULTURE EXPERIMENTS IN LOUISIANA. 



The strike was much heavier than in Falsemouth Bay, a phenom- 

 enon correlated with the greater number of breeding oysters in the 

 vicinity and the consequent more general and copious distribution of 

 the free-swimming young oysters. During the first year about 95 

 per cent of the shells tonged up after the lapse of a few months bore 

 spat, and the average number of young oysters w^as 6 or 7 to the 

 shell, but after the lapse of the first year the number of oysters per 

 shell had decreased somewhat. In the second year the number of 

 shells receiving a strike was about the same, but there were fewer 

 spat per shell. In the first year the clusters were composed of from 

 1 to 11 individuals, and in the second year of from 1 to 7 or 8. 



Considering the density of the set in these waters the experiments 

 indicate that the shells should not be planted in greater quantities 

 than from 200 to 400 bushels per acre, though on the softer bottoms, 

 where some of the cultch will sink in the mud, the quantity may be 

 increased with advantage to perhaps 500 bushels. On the bottom 

 experimented with there was apparently no advantage in depositing 

 the shells in piles and, in fact, the more evenly they are distributed, 

 the less the chance that the oysters will become so massed as to inter- 

 fere with their growth and nutrition. 



The yield per acre at the end of the thirty-two months was about 

 1,500 standard bushels of culled oysters, with about an equal amount 

 of shells, fragments, and mussels. The oysters were badly clustered 

 and the debris was made up largely of those which had died from 

 overcrowding. They were long, narrow, thin-shelled, and in general 

 of the type known to the oyster men as " coony " or raccoon oysters. 



These oysters were about 2f inches long at the end of eleven months, 

 3| inches in twenty months, and from 4 to 5 inches, with an average 

 of about 4i inches, at the end of thirty-two months. Although they 

 were longer than those of corresponding age raised in Falsemouth 

 Bay, they were so narrow and flat that the latter were over 50 per 

 cent more bulky in specimens of the same length. The volume of the 

 shells in both cases bore about the same relation to the total volume, 

 and the difference was solely in the deeper and more capacious cavity 

 of the Falsemouth Bay oysters, which is correlated with the volume 

 of the meats. 



By actual count the 32-months-old oysters raised on this plan- 

 tation averaged about 240 to the standard bushel and they turned 

 out about d^ and 4 pints of drained meats per bushel, approxi- 

 mately half the quantity yielded by a bushel of Falsemouth Bay 

 plants. This extremely low yield for such thin-shelled oysters 

 was due in part to the small size of the cavity, but also largely to 

 their extremely poor condition as regards fatness. The experiment 

 was tried of culling the oysters on half of one section of the planta- 



