24 American Fisheries Society 



munity as well. The live fishes in the boxes are taken out as 

 wanted and dressed, the offal thrown into the river, usually- 

 taken into the current of the river and allowed to float away. 

 This refers only to the coarse fish, as bass can not be taken lawfully 

 with seines or nets at any time in the year and sunfish and crappie, 

 strange to say, are slow at markets and the waste in dressing them 

 is light, as they are scaled and the heads left on. Fish confined 

 in live boxes suffer greatly, as they are usually crowded, the water 

 generally warm and the slow current changes the water cor- 

 respondingly slowly, so that a considerable percentage always 

 die and, as stated before, are dumped into the river again. 



As soon as seining is lawful in the state the big seines are put 

 to work on the Illinois river in the great stretches of water such 

 as Peoria Lake, Havana Lake, Meredosia Bay, and in similar 

 places along the Mississippi river. In all my knowledge of the 

 fishing industry, I have noticed that it has been the custom of the 

 smaller fishermen to take their fish daily to a fish boat or market 

 and sell them in the rough. Here ensues more waste as only such 

 fish as are lively enough to keep in their boxes are paid for, or, 

 if the fish are needed for immediate dressing and shipment, only 

 those red in the gills are used and the rest go overboard, as a rule. 

 Frequently the fish taken from nets which have not been raised 

 for a day or two in warm weather, are thrown out at the time or 

 taken to the shipper with the others and all that are not fresh 

 are thrown into the river there. 



Some years ago I was coming up the Illinois river on the 

 steamer "Illinois," then working jointly with the U. S. Fish 

 Commission, and after passing the dam, a Government lock at 

 Kampsville, we ran into a stream of dead fish floating on the 

 surface of the water — thousands of them. This continued for 

 fifty miles, frequently great fields of them covering almost the 

 entire surface of the channel of the river, then a thin stream of 

 them, but always dead fish in sight. When investigated as to the 

 cause, it proved to have been a large catch all along the river 

 with warm weather and a glutted market, and fish dying in live 

 boxes were thrown into the river — a criminal waste of good food 

 through bad methods and lack of care. This was not a frequent 

 occurrence in such numbers, of course, but is not unusual to some 

 degree, as a trip along the Illinois in a boat or launch will prove. 



