128 Thirty- Second Annual Meeting 



Even the top minnow, viviparous, which we had supposed to be 

 the least harmful, was found by actual observation to be vei*} 

 destructive to black bass fry. Our best success this year has been 

 where the minnows were the fewest, an effort having been made 

 last fall to clean them all out. This will be repeated the coming" 

 fall, and not a living thing in the fish species, aside from th." 

 brood fish, will be left in the bass ponds, if it be possible to ab- 

 solutely annihilate it. Our experience a year ago satisfied us- 

 that this should be done. Where we had the most minnows we 

 produced the fewest young bass. Mr. Lydell, in his remarks at 

 the close of the reading of his paper at Put-in-Bay, it will be re- 

 membered, advocated this course strongly, saying that he did 

 not know of a minnow which would not devour bass fry when 

 small. 



The third jDoint that I would wish to make is not so apparenc 

 as the other two, but if you wish to turn out a good lot of finger- 

 lings it is especially necessary, and that is persistent and regular 

 feeding during the breeding season. This is more essential south 

 than north, for here our breeding season lasts over four months, 

 beginning this year on ]\Iareli 1st, when the first eggs were iden- 

 tified positively, although there were several nests well out from 

 shore on the last day of February, and several nests with good 

 lots of eggs being seen on them the early part of July, this long- 

 season being caused, I believe, by the females spawning several 

 times in a season, as we know they do here, while they likely 

 deposit all of their eggs at one time in the north. If the fish 

 are fed every other day about all they want and especially well 

 wlion a rise in temperature follows a cold spell, when the fish 

 will ])(' found to have ravenous appetites, often rusliing into a 

 l^rood of fry and securing a mouthful in spite of the efforts of 

 the parent fish to prevent it, cannibalism will l)e reduced to -i 

 minimum, so far as the adults are concerned. 



During the rest of the year the brood fish sliould be fed 

 enough to keep them in healtliy, growing condition or they will 



not produce good results, and the feed should be mainly fish 



we use almost entirely cut niuMct from the sea slioi'e — our expe- 

 rience last year, when tadpoles were mainly used, having demon- 

 strated that fish in some form is the best. Of course a change 

 of diet is l)encHcial and we now n'ive our breeding bass an occa- 



