Downing. — Hatcheries on the Great Lakes 131 



balance were planted in Thunder Bay about twelve miles out from 

 Alpena. I was soon sent away from Alpena, and about four years 

 after having made the plants in Thunder Bay, I received a letter from 

 a man both a dealer and fisherman, who, while I was at Alpena used 

 to blackguard me a great deal about getting money that I was not 

 earning, as I was in the government employ and having a snap, and 

 asking me what I did with all those millions of fry that I claimed to 

 have hatched. 



In the letter, he inquired if I could tell him how he could get some 

 more pike-perch fry planted in Thunder Bay, saying that that year, 

 beginning with the first lift of fish in May, the take of pike-perch in 

 waters where they had not been known before had ranged anywhere 

 from 1,500 pounds to three tons at a lift from 4-pound nets, and con- 

 tinued until November, when he took his nets out. 



Mr. Meehan : In 1904 a man at Sunbury on the Susquehanna applied 

 to my department for some pike-perch to be planted in the river. The 

 stock had been distributed, and all that I had then were some blue 

 pike, which were just coming in. I told him that I had no pike-perch 

 or "salmon" as he called them, but did have some blue pike, very much 

 the same, in fact, said by ichthyologists to be the same thing, that I 

 would send him. I sent him a supply which he planted. Three years 

 later I began receiving letters from the neighborhood of Sunbury, 

 from between Sunbury and 15 miles below, asking whether I had heard 

 about anything being wrong with the Susquehanna salmon ; the people 

 were beginning to catch quite a number of fish of a peculiar bluish 

 tinge and thought they were totally unlike in color to the "salmon" in 

 the Susquehanna, which were called yellow. They would have thought 

 that the fish were diseased, only they struck the hook and fought as 

 vigorously as did the salmon. Did T know what was the matter! 



Blue pike are being caught in considerable numbers from Williams- 

 port down to a short distance above Harrisburg, and it is considered 

 today to be rather more abundant in the Juniata, in the Huntington 

 and Blair County section, than the Susquehanna section itself, where it 

 is today known and called the blue pike as distinguishing it from the 

 Susquehanna salmon. 



Dr. Tarleton H. Bean, Albany, N. Y. : New York is not doing as 

 much in the hatching of eggs from Lake Erie fish as it expects to do in 

 the future, because New York has no suitable vessels for egg collecting 

 on that lake. For the past few years small numbers of lake herring and 

 blue pike have been developed at Bemus Point, on Chautauqua Lake, 

 and Caledonia. I need not say to any expert fish culturist that it is 

 pretty difficult to do the work at long range without a suitable collecting 

 vessel. Still, if I remember rightly, the plant last spring from those 

 two stations was not less than 30,000,000 of lake herring and nearly as 

 many blue pike. We are, in fact, just beginning. 



Our pike-perch work is done chiefly at Lake Oneida, where we have 

 no difficulty in taking upward of a hundred thousand gravid fish in a 



