90 Tzueiity-scvcuth Annual Meeting 



all occupations, a careless, negligent, dull spawn-taker is the one 

 to be avoided. He should be intelligent, progressive, obedient 

 to orders and as such, should be paid well for his services and 

 retained from year to year. 



About seventy-five spawn-takers are employed at the Put-in- 

 Bay station each fall, and it will be apparent to the most casual 

 observer that this plan of examining eggs must result in the 

 securing of a much larger number of good eggs than would other- 

 wise be the case. 



The great advantage of the microscope is that you can deter- 

 mine in twenty-four hours whether your eggs are good or not 

 and apply the remedy, while without it, especially in the case of 

 unimpregnated eggs, you have to wait until the season is nearly 

 over before you know the result, and in the meantime you have, 

 perhaps, lost millions of eggs which should have been saved. 

 The writer frequently uses the telegraph in calling delinquent 

 spawn-takers to task and believes that it has paid well on the in- 

 vestment. 



Aside from examining eggs to determine their quality, the 

 microscope can be made of use almost daily while eggs and fry 

 are in the house. Many little emergencies arise when you wish 

 to make a closer examination of eggs or fry than you can make 

 with the unaided eye, and it soon becomes a second nature to 

 resort to the microscope. 



To illustrate: At the Put-in-Iiay station one morning last 

 April, it was discovered that the pike-perch eggs were so light in 

 the jars that it was difficult to keep them from flowing out. 

 although the water had been shut down to a considerable extent. 

 The microscope revealed the fact that colonies of infusoria — 

 mainly the species Carchesium, with a few Vorticella — were so 

 common that it w^as difficult to find an egg without one or more. 

 The eggs were thoroughly feathered, thus breaking ofT the sleft- 

 der stems by which the animals were attached to the eggs, when 

 they worked as well as ever and no harm was done further than 

 that incident to the handling of this very tender egg. I will 

 state, incidentally, that this phenomenon had never occurred be- 

 fore at the Put-in-Bay station and I have never heard of it else- 

 where. 



As is well known to fish culturists, there is a small loss among 

 all kinds of fish eggs after the embryo has formed, what is called 

 in ordinary hatchery parlance "deadeyed eggs." The micro- 

 scope will be found convenient in studying the cause of this loss. 

 In the whitefish eggs exannned by the writer the past season it 



