280 Fortieth Annual Meeting 



has still closer quarters to work in and less chance to keep 

 spawn and apparatus out of the way of the fishing crew. 

 At no time is a small boat as steady and convenient to work 

 in as a larger one, and it will be seen that during rough 

 weather the spawner who collects eggs from fish taken in 

 trap nets does his work under extreme difficulties. As 

 fully seventy-five per cent of the pike-perch eggs collected 

 for the Put-in Bay station are secured from fish so caught, 

 as the pike-perch eggs are among the most difficult to collect, 

 manipulate and deliver to the station in good condition, and 

 as fully one-half of the eggs brought to this station are 

 collected in fields so remote that they have to be packed on 

 trays and shipped from the field station in cases by rail and 

 by boat, is it any wonder that from forty to fifty per cent 

 of eyed eggs is all that the fish culturist can get out of the 

 total take? 



Nor does the trouble in handling pike-perch eggs end 

 upon safe delivery at the station and setting up in the jars. 

 It does not cease until the fry are all hatched and either 

 deposited in the lake or turned over to the car crew for the 

 troubles that may come then. In fact, we sometimes feel 

 like speaking of the pike-perch eggs after the manner of 

 the man in a controversy who after exhausting his stock 

 of epithets, said to his opponent, "and if you can think of 

 any mean thing that I haven't called you, you are that too." 



DISCUSSION 



President : We all know who have had any experience with pike 

 perch, that they are among the most difficult fish to progagate that 

 we have. 



Mr. S. F. Fullerton, St. Paul, Minn.: I would like to ask Mr. 

 Downing if that is not the closed season? 



Mr. F. N. Clark, Northville, Mich. : I doubt whether Mr. FuUerton 

 has the same laws we have in Michigan. During the spawning season 

 of the pike perch, the whitefish, and the lake trout, the fishermen are 

 allowed to fish, but they must take all the eggs, impregnate them and 

 turn them over to the Bureau of Fisheries or the Michigan Fish Com- 

 mission. That is the law there. It is not a closed season any further 

 than that they cannot fish if they will not obey the law. On the 



