280 . How to obtain it. 



the enemies which the young fish have most to dread may perhaps 

 be their own parents. It very often happens that a salmon has 

 no sooner got rid of its ova than some hungry trout which has 

 been lurking in the vicinity, and probably anxiously watching the 

 whole operation, goes in and makes a meal of that which with 

 proper care might produce hundreds, nay perhaps thousands, of 

 fish. Thus the eggs which a salmon may travel over a hundred 

 miles to deposit, threading rapids, wriggling over shallows, leaping 

 weirs and cascades, and encountering all manner of difficulties 

 and dangers by the way, are often destroyed as soon as they are 

 shed by the parent fish. 



It is estimated that at least seventy-five per cent, of the eggs 

 are lost immediately, and of the other quantity a large portion is 

 destroyed in one way or other before hatching takes place. We 

 know that whole spawning beds are often washed away, or buried 

 many feet deep by the debris brought down by floods, to say 

 nothing of all the host of enemies (animal, vegetable, and mineral) 

 that are ranged in battle array against poor unfortunate Salmo 

 salar. When we consider for a moment that a sjngle salmon 

 deposits in one season, say ten or fifteen thousand eggs, according 

 to its weight, and that owing to the great destruction, natural and 

 otherwise, not one egg in five hundred produces a mature fish, 

 and remember how at this comparatively small rate of increase 

 some of our rivers formerly held a goodly number of fish, surely 

 it will at once be apparent that if one-fourth of the ova annually 

 deposited came to maturity, the rivers would in a few years be so 

 full of fish, that it would require some^ extra means of capture for 

 adequately dealing with them, and keeping their increasing 

 numbers within bounds. And to the skilled fish culturist there 

 is nothing unreasonable in the assumption that such a result 

 might be brought about by the simple application of the proper 

 means for doing it. 



The work of collecting the ova, being so similar to that 

 detailed for trout, needs no further description. That which 

 seems to have been rather badly managed is the collection of the 

 spawners themselves, before they are ripe, and their retention in 

 suitable ponds. The cost of collecting ova in the ordinary way, 

 by netting a stream, is very considerable, and, as we have seen 



