178 American Fisheries Society 



Professor Dyche: I do not know anything about trout. 



Mr. Thomson : Take trout in water warmer than 74°, and these 

 trout will live longer in the grass than in the water. 



Mr. Dyche : 1 should like to see some experiments carried on in 

 this line. 



Mr. Thomson: I should be glad to cooperate with you. I have 

 had considerable opposition on that line, but not with fishermen. There 

 is a difference between fishmen and a fisherman. Some of the oldest 

 fishmen in this state came out bluntly and said the whole proposition 

 was bosh. One of these fishmen said that he had been in the fish busi- 

 ness 25 years in Colorado and had handled hundreds of thousands of 

 pounds of fish and had never found that condition to exist ; and that 

 if it did exist, our fish would die by the thousands. But he was speak- 

 ing from the fishman's standpoint, when in the spawning field they were 

 taken out of a tub of water, and the hand was wet, and not from the 

 fisherman's along the stream when the hand is dry. 



Mr. S. E. Land, Denver, Colo.: As 1 understand it, in the case 

 of a fish taken without moistening the hand, the mucous is removed, 

 thus causing fungus, and the fish shed their fins because of the fungus. 



Mr. Thomson : That fish shed its coloring from the treatment I 

 gave it ; it lost its fins and every particle of coloring ; it was strictly 

 a white fish. 



Mr. Land: To what do you attribute it, to the removal of the 

 mucus on the fish from the handling with dry hands? 



Mr. Thomson: I can answer that in this way: When a bird loses 

 its feathers, it has nothing to protect it. Now the protection of that 

 trout was the slime on its back — nature's protection — and the use of 

 your dry hand, contrary to the order of nature, will remove that pro- 

 tection. 



Mr. Land: When Dr. Bean was Director of the New York 

 Aquarium he gave me a demonstration of how he cured fish from which 

 the mucus was gone through injury or fungus. He used salt water 

 from the ocean. 



Mr. Thomson : I have used peroxide of hydrogen — just raised the 

 fish enough out of the water to pour peroxide on it ; and I have thus 

 destroyed the fungus and saved the fish. 



Mr. Land: I am like Professor Dyche; I want to have a scientific 

 demonstration of these things. But I admire Mr. Thomson for the 

 step he has taken in regard to the protection of the undersized fish. 



I am operating now on the Cottonwood Lakes in the Grand Mesa 

 of the Colorado. I have had bills printed on cloth, using the very 

 statements that Mr. Thomson makes on his cards. Its effect in the 

 education of the people has been very marked, and they are all handling 

 their fish with much more care. It is a grand and humane thing td 

 have undersized fish returned to the water without injury. 



It is important also to get people to act in cooperation with the 

 boards of health, by being careful to avoid throwing entrails of fish, 

 or washing fish in the streams. On the Cottonwood Lakes we are 

 earnest in our endeavor to educate people along the line of keeping the 

 waters pure. 



