FISHING AT HOME AND ABROAD 

 Gazette " some extremely interesting discoveries of means by which 

 the age of pike and other fish may be ascertained. 



The age of some fish, especially of salmon, can be told with comparatively 

 great exactitude, and also whether the fish have spawned or not, by examin- 

 ing the rings on the scales, which can be seen when a scale is cleaned and 

 examined with a magnifying glass, by holding it up to the light. For some 

 freshwater fish, especially trout and pike, when of a good size, this method 

 is not so satisfactory as, after a certain age, the annual rings become 

 blurred, and appear to run into one another, so that they are useless as 

 an index of age. In "The Fishing Gazette" of February 17, March 2, 9, 

 and 16, 1912, I gave the first account published in English, of a method 

 of getting at the age of fish by counting the annual rings on the gill -cover, 

 shoulder -bone and backbone. These methods, which were first used 

 with sea fish by Professor Heincke, and Dr Im.mermann, were afterwards 

 applied with great success by Dr J. Arnold, of St Petersburg, to many 

 kinds of freshwater fish; for instance, Dr Arnold found that a pike of 

 nearly twenty -four pounds from Lake Ilmen was ten years old, but Dr 

 Arnold thinks this was an unusually fast and well -grown fish. Sections 

 of one of the bones of a pike's backbone appear to give the best series of 

 annual rings. 



Pike spawn in the spring from end of February to April, according 

 to the mildness or severity of the weather; the fish collect together from 

 the deeper parts of a river or lake, and, with considerable splashing among 

 the weeds in the shallower water near the sides, the female, generally 

 accompanied by one or two males, deposits an enormous number of eggs 

 among the weeds — a five -pound fish will yield some hundred thousand 

 eggs, and they are then fertilized by the milt of the male fish. At this 

 spawning period the fish are too busy to feed much, though, just when 

 they are collecting together, before spawning, they are often simply raven- 

 ous. The best, and often the only time, in deep, weedy, or rocky lakes, for 

 getting rid of pike by netting is when they are on the shallows spawning; 

 they lose then much of their natural fear of man. 



As regards its voracity, it may be said that a hungry pike will attack 

 anything and everything which comes in its way which has life or the 

 appearance of life, from a child's toy boat to the muzzle of a horse drink- 

 ing at the side of a lake. Many of all sizes have been found dead, choked 

 by a fish little smaller than itself, and often of its own species. I always 

 think one of the best pike tales is that of the big retriever dog which had 

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