FISH AND WILDLIFE BRANCH 



DURING the year under review Dr. H. H. MacKay, Supervisor of the Fisheries 

 Section, retired. This makes the year a milestone in the history of the Depart- 

 ment, and of fisheries management in Ontario. There were biologists before — 

 one might even so designate Dr. McCallum, who became Game Commissioner 

 after the report of 1892, which he had a large hand in shaping, was put into 

 effect, or C. M. Nash, of the Provincial Normal School Museum, whose fisheries 

 studies featured early Departmental reports. The Province also contributed in 

 one way or another to fisheries research, over a long period. Neither McCallum 

 nor Nash nor any other was ever an employee in the ordinary sense, nor, until 

 Dr. MacKay was employed in 1926 was there any provision for transforming 

 fisheries research into fisheries management. He was the first, and for many 

 years had the chief responsibility for bringing scientific standards into Departmental 

 fisheries procedures. 



To a large degree, at first. Dr. MacKay was concerned with fish culture 

 and restocking. This is one of the most important and expensive of our 

 activities, and can be either productive or wasteful, depending on the degree 

 to which scientifically determined facts are used to guide action. When it was 

 first discovered that fish could be artificially reared, the public imagination 

 envisioned something akin to the planting of trees or of crops, and fish culture 

 was hailed as a cure for all fisheries problems. This is all very well, except 

 that we do not plant trees or crops where there is already a well-established 

 growth, and we take some account of land capability. Because the aquatic 

 environment has depth, and one cannot see what is happening in it, people quite 

 cheerfully did the equivalent of planting trees on bare rock, or sowing the fall 

 wheat to corn in the springtime. 



Actually, fishes are very demanding in their requirements. The physical 

 and chemical nature of the water, the nutrients, the fishes already there, are 

 of immense importance, and failure and waste were the penalty for ignorance, 

 a penalty which we were even ignorant of paying. 



Once we can get ourselves away from stupidly putting fish into waters 

 where the natural production is more than adequate, and then fatuously attributing 

 to stocking an abundance of fish which is actually no more than the result of a 

 year of good survival from natural production, we can make our hatchery 

 production really work for our benefit. The units are now mostly modernized. 

 We can maintain good fishing in suitable lakes where natural production is 

 deficient, even if it should happen to be a lake the size of Superior. We can, 

 as we have shown already, produce useful hybrids, and work elsewhere has 

 proved that hatchery strains can be selected and bred for a large variety of 

 desirable qualities. In the future, we expect to find ourselves balancing such 

 things as growth rate and catchability in choosing our stock for a certain water. 

 By that time we shall also be leaving to nature the jobs that she does better 

 than we can do. 



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