Fish Culture 385 



planting in a new place is more or less an experiment. 

 Sheep culture would be in a state quite comparable 

 with the fish culture of to-day, if after rearing lambs 

 on the bottle they were turned loose in an unexplored 

 forest to shift for themselves. 



The hatcheries are raising fry and not fishes. This is, 

 of course, what they were commissioned to do, the 

 underlying idea being merely that of putting back into 

 the lakes and streams a copious supply of young fishes 

 to occupy the place of the adult fishes taken out. But 

 experience has shown that the mere planting of fry 

 soon reaches its effective limit, after which the planting 

 of more fry is sheer waste. The conditions in the wild 

 are not such as yield much advantage from this intensive 

 propagation of the young. Oftentimes the fry planted 

 in the trout streams about Ithaca may be found shortly 

 afterward in the stomachs of the few adult trout that 

 live in the same streams. Feeding fishes on the young 

 of their own kind is not good husbandry. 



The planting of fry and of fingerlings is effective 

 where conditions permit of their growth. The removal 

 of enemies is a supplemental measure of great value 

 where practicable. The care of natural feeding grounds 

 to prevent their destruction is very important, but 

 usually impossible, for want of enlightened public 

 opinion. Protecting of breeding fishes when on their 

 spawning grounds — the time when they are most 

 easily discovered and destroyed — is also very import- 

 ant. And the bringing back into habitable places of 

 young fishes stranded in the side pools of bottomland 

 streams, where they would perish with the evaporation 

 of the water, is rescue work of a good sort. All these 

 things are done in the interests of public fishing at the 

 present day. They are such measures as are taken to 

 preserve wild game in a forest or livestock on an open 

 range. They have to do rather with hunting than with 

 husbandry. 



