104 American Fisheries Society. 



run of salt water smelt, and it has always seemed mystifying to me how a 

 little, delicate fish like the smelt could spawn in the very quick water and 

 have practically all the eggs located right on the bottom and sides of the 

 stream in the quick water. That is why I wondered whether there was 

 much difference between the smelt spawning and the larger fish, such as 

 the wall-eyed pike; apparently there is not. 



Mr. Cobb : I am not familiar with the spawning habits of the smelt. 



Dr. Embody: Do I understand that you had a continuous mass of 

 pike-perch eggs nearly one hundred feet long on the bottom? 



Mr. Cobb: Yes. You could go out there, take a kick into it with 

 your boots and kick up a bunch that would fill a hatching jar. 



Mr. Downing : There is one feature that Mr. Cobb has brought out 

 which is very gratifying to me. He tells us he has almost absolutely con- 

 trolled the taking and hatching of his eggs, whereas in our work the eggs 

 are taken under the most adverse conditions. They are taken in small 

 toats out on the open lake by the fishermen themselves, then we buy 

 the eggs from them. All our i-eceiving stations are from twelve to forty 

 miles from our hatching stations. Some of our eggs are shipped on 

 trains and have to be held three or four days. It gratifies me to say 

 that under these conditions my hatch this year was forty-three per cent. 

 They were taken just the same as any other egg, without the use of 

 starch or muck. 



Mr. Cobb : Our percentage was a little light this year. 



Mr. Hare: How can you determine your percentage on pike-perch? 



Mr. Cobb: It is not tied down to a definite number. We do not 

 make an exact count. We measure the eggs, and we measure the eyed 

 eggs just as late as possible before the hatch. We keep watching the 

 tanks for any that have died after the hatch. The loss is small from 

 that time on. Sometimes we have something that offsets that, but that 

 is what we take as a figure. It is quite accurate up to that last estimate, 

 which might cause a variation. 



Mr. Mannfeld: Has Mr. Cobb ever tried to raise wall-eyed pike? 



Mr. Cobb: Only to a very early stage; I have never got very far 

 with them. 



Mr. Mannfeld: I want to tell you something of an experiment 

 of ours in Indiana. Unfortunately, we have no waters from which we 

 can take fish in order to strip them; we have to purchase our eggs. We 

 have some friends in Michigan who have been kind enough to sell us eggs. 

 Two years ago I wanted to see what we really could do with pike-perch 

 fry. We planted between twenty and thirty thousand fry in a pond 

 which had absolutely nothing else in it; we were first careful to make 

 sure that the small insect life in this pond which would constitute food 

 for the fish was very prolific. Along in September we gave a State Fair 

 exhibit, and we took fingerlings out of the pond some of which were ten 

 and a half inches long, some five or six inches long. When we drained 

 that pond in the fall we had one fish that was seventeen and a quarter 

 inches long. Out of the twenty or thirty thousand that we placed in 



