TROUT PROPAGATION 



sixty days in hatching. Say that trout are hatched on 

 Long Island in March, during the following summer 

 they will be fry, and in the fall they will be fingerlings, 

 seven or eight months old. The next season they will 

 be yearlings, and as they spawn in the fall of the sec- 

 ond season, they will actually be twenty months old at 

 spawning time, although from custom they are called 

 yearlings. Consequently, a yearling brook trout at 

 spawning time is from eighteen to twenty months of 

 age, dating from the time it left the egg. A yearling 

 trout may yield from fifty to 250 eggs, the eggs being 

 one-sixth of an inch in diameter, quite different from 

 the mustard-seed eggs which the fisherman found in 

 the fish he caught during the summer months of the 

 open season. A trout but four inches long has been 

 known to yield forty ripe eggs. Many yearling trout 

 in wild waters are not six inches long, and where the 

 six-inch trout law is observed numbers of trout will 

 spawn before they can be legally killed. If there 

 were no six-inch trout law, it would be possible to kill 

 the trout before they spawned once, and the stock 

 would have to depend almost entirely upon artificial 

 propagation, with but slight aid from natural processes. 

 A " yearling " trout in one of the State rearing-ponds 

 is quite a different fish from a wild trout of the same 

 age, for the State rears yearlings (seventeen months 

 from the egg) that are ten and one-half inches long. 

 Two-year-old trout may yield as many as 500 eggs, 

 and older fish as many as 1,500. 

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