50 American Fisheries Society 



In this detached portion were 27 eggs adhering together. 

 Thirteen displaced eggs were embedded in various parts of the 

 anterior viscera and 113 loose in the abdominal cavity, while 

 15 remained in normal position in the ovary, 6 of which were 

 still enclosed in follicles. This example suggests that attempt 

 had been made to completely strip a fish not wholly ripe. 



The foregoing indicates that if the artificial means of secur- 

 irig eggs of these fishes is continued, the structures and 

 arrangements herein described must be considered, and some 

 modification- of the method be adopted. To this end, the 

 Bureau of Fisheries purposes to conduct some experiments 

 with rainbow trout. The situation, however, involves all Sal- 

 monidae and related fishes. 



Discussion 



Mr. Eben W. Cobb, St. Paul, Minn.: I infer from the paper that 

 it is the view of the writer that our method of stripping is wrong, and 

 that it is very harmful to the fish. But men engaged in fish culture 

 have been handling the same fish year after year and getting good re- 

 sults through the employment of this method, and that would seem to 

 be a strong argument in favor of the assertion that stripping is not 

 harmful. Some of these men can handle their fish very rapidly, at the 

 rate of about one in five seconds, and most of them no not know very 

 much about the structure of the fish. It seems to me that the suggestion 

 made in the paper in this regard might be an encouragement to people 

 to say that fish are killed in stripping. I believe there are various 

 methods of stripping, if you could call them methods. Many men 

 handle the fish in a certain way ; others take hold of them in an 

 entirely different way, using a different part of the hand. I myself 

 contend that my method is right, but other men who claim that I am 

 wrong seem to get just as good results as I do — perhaps some of them 

 get better results. What I want to know, then, is how we can apply 

 this information for the betterment of our work. I would like to 

 know also how this information in regard to the structure of the fish 

 could be applied practically by the fish culturist. 



Dr. Kendall: I did not intend to convey the idea that injury 

 would always result from stripping the fish, but it was my purpose to 

 indicate the danger of injury from improper handling; that one conse- 

 quence of stripping the fish was that there were a lot of eggs deposited 

 in the abdominal cavity, which is not the natural place for them ; and 

 after they are there, it is with difficulty, if at all, that they can be 

 removed. In fact, almost every fish that I have examined after strip- 

 ping, has contained a variable percentage of eggs that were not obtained 



