102 Thirty-Second Annual Meeting 



teresting. The fishes showed themselves on top of the water and 

 flurried the water and made noises that would attract your at- 

 tention, so that you would turn around to see the water breaking 

 a hundred yards away. I thought l)efore that that there was a 

 good deal of imagination in it, but I know that it is a fact, and 

 any one can witness it, and when that is going on it is the spawn- 

 ing season, which follows right on the heels of the shad spawn- 

 ing. The rock fish eggs are manipulated practically the same 

 way as shad eggs, except that a lower tank head is required, and 

 the eggs hatch in a period of thirty-six hours. 



DISCUSSION. 



Mr. Titconib : Won't you explain the measurement of sixty 

 quarts of eggs out of the twenty pound fish, the way they come 

 up. 



Mr. Worth : I had extraordinarily large spawning pans — 1 

 think they must have been sixteen inches in diameter — I had 

 bought them at Weldon where the market is limited and had to 

 take anything I could find. I took the eggs in fifteen pans, and 

 ordinarily I should say that I could have taken in those fifteen 

 pans the eggs from forty-five shad, easily, and yet from that ono 

 fish the eggs were so numerous that I had to take three more 

 pans and spread the eggs out so as to hold them. 



When the eggs are taken they are extremely small and of the 

 most beautiful gi-een I ever saw, and they are quite sticky, i 

 poured water on them continuously while they were water hard- 

 ening in order to keep them from clinging together. 



The fish actually hatched and liberated from those 9,000,000 

 eggs amounted in round numbers to about 3,000,000 of fish ; but 

 our weakest point at Weldon was in the hatchery, where we were 

 not properly equipped — we were short of men and the men in 

 there did not know too much about the business. I had selectea 

 them on account of their grit rather than their experience. I 

 think if it had been our second year and with the same condi- 

 tions that we would have gotten 30,000,000 of eggs, and I believe 

 that we are going to get an average of 75,000,000 or 100,000,000 

 eggs per season at about the same expense or a little less than 

 running one of our shad hatcheries. 



As for the trausportation of the fry, it seems as it they would 



