American Fisheries Society 247 



In cutting up the paddlefish the heads and fins are usually 

 discarded, but sometimes they are boiled for their oil. The 

 roe is then removed to be prepared into caviar. It weighs 

 from two to twelve or fifteen pounds, in a single fish. It is 

 put on a coarse wire sieve and rubbed by hand across the 

 wires until the eggs are separated from their membranes 

 and drop into the bucket beneath the sieve. The raw caviar 

 is then mixed with " German " salt and is ready for ship- 

 ment. It must undergo still further preparation, however, 

 before it is in the form familiar to us. In its raw state it 

 brings about half a dollar a pound. It is said that spoon- 

 bill caviar is the best known, having received the highest 

 award at one of the world expositions. 



DISCUSSION 



Dr. B. W. Evermann, Washington, D. C. : I was very much interested 

 in the paper on the spoonbill this morning and wish to say a word 

 about that fish. One of the first spoonbill fisheries to develop in the 

 country was that of Louisville, Ky., on the Ohio River. As long ago 

 as 1898 I visited Louisville, where the fishermen were catching con- 

 siderable numbers every spring. They had been catching various sorts 

 of fish in the spring with seines which dragged the bottom of the 

 river and did not fish at or near the surface, but they experimented and 

 tried the use of seines which did not reach the bottom; but which fished 

 the first five or ten feet from the surface down, and then they caught 

 the spoonbill cat and the shovel-nosed sturgeon in very considerable 

 numbers. They had been using the spoonbill cat then as food and 

 using the eggs as caviar. The price then of the eggs was as high as 

 35 cents or 40 cents at Louisville and a higher price prevailed at New 

 York. Of course, since then the price has gone on increasing until it 

 is now quite as high as the price of the eggs of the lake or Atlantic 

 sturgeon, which is $1.25 a pound — a very rapid and considerable increase 

 in price. 



The queerest thing about the spoonbill is this, that no one has been 

 able to locate definitely its spawning grounds and to find the young fry. 

 Spoonbills five or six inches long are about as small as anyone has ever 

 reported. I think the smallest I have ever seen were eight inches ; but 

 fish five or six inches long have been reported. 



That is one of the most important and interesting problems to be 

 undertaken. It has been attacked by several embryologists and others, 

 that is, to work out the life history of the young spoonbill; and some 



