212 Modern Fishculture in Fresh and Salt Water. 



night, and the eggs adhere to stones or any other 

 thing. On a stream where thousands of smelt have 

 spawned at nighf not a fish can be seen by day ; they 

 have dropped back into deeper water. My first plant 

 of some 30,000 smelt fry in 1885, m the stream named, 

 resulted in the getting of over 30,000,000 of eggs ten 

 years later. 



A smelt weighing 2 ounces will yield 40,000 eggs ; 

 the eggs run about 20 to the inch, or about 500,000 to 

 the quart. At first we took the spawn by hand and 

 broke up the bunching by passing them through a 

 sieve several times to break the "foot stalk;" but after 

 getting better results from some which had been neg- 

 lected in a hatching trough, we merely placed the fish 

 in the troughs, covered them from the light and got a 

 better impregnation. 



A curious thing in this work is that the fish laid 

 their eggs in the stream in less than six inches of 

 water, in direct sunlight, and the great increase shows 

 that they must have hatched in great numbers. In 

 our hatchery we had to cover the jars from even dif- 

 fused light or they would die. 



Perhaps nature provides for this in the bunching 

 habit. During the first years of experimenting with 

 smelts I sent out a lot to the Adirondacks in bunches. 

 My instructions were: "No matter how decayed or 

 fungused they are on the outside, nor how badly they 

 smell, don't throw them away. Open the bunches and 

 you will find them bright and alive inside." The eggs 

 went up in the Bisby Lake region, but I could never 

 get a reply from the man there ; but it seemed to me at 

 that time as if nature protected the inner eggs from 

 light and too much oxygen by allowing them to ball up 

 in that way; but then how did the little fish in the mid- 



