Foods and Feeding of Fishes 143 



Mr. Titcomb: How do you mix it? 



Mb. Buller : In the early stage of the fry it is mixed with the liver, 

 but as the fry advance we feed it at night; that is, the fish are fed con- 

 stantly all they will take. We have men who do nothing else but feed ; 

 that is their business. Our aim is to keep our fish as full as possible, 

 keep them growing as fast as possible. The last food that man gives is 

 milk curd; that is put into the troughs in the evening and by morning 

 it has disappeared ; there is never any of it left. As these fish grow in 

 size, the combination then is the liver and heart and lung ground to- 

 gether. 



At what lengths do you begin to feed the complete 



From two to three inches. 

 Do you feed clabbered milk to the larger fish? 

 Mr. Buller: Not to any considerable extent. We do occasionally 

 in the ponds, but in the fry stage and up until they are two or three 

 inches long we think it is a very beneficial food along with the sheep 

 pluck. As a result of long years of study we find that that food is 

 giving the best satisfaction with our trout, and we are sticking to it. As 

 I mentioned this morning we have started feeding shrimp. I am not 

 condemning shrimp at all — I hope I am mistaken in regard to it; further 

 studies would seem to be necessary on that phase of the subject. Every 

 fish culturist admires the beautiful colors of the trout which we are not 

 able to produce with this artificial food. In order to produce these 

 beautiful colors I conceived the idea of feeding the trout with shrimp. I 

 refer to trout that we were keeping for exhibition purposes; in fact, 

 that is the only purpose for which we keep any adult trout, with the 

 exception of brown trout. Well, in the pond where we fed the shrimp, 

 the trout practically all died. We intend, however, to carry that 

 experiment a little further; it may not have been the shrimp that 

 caused the trouble in that particular pond. 



With regard to the feeding of bass, I suppose Pennsylvania has 

 spent as much money as any State in the Union on the rearing of small 

 mouth black bass. That is the fish that the sportsmen are insisting 

 upon having, though we are trying to convince them that it is absolute- 

 ly impossible to grow and rear them in any considerable quantities. At 

 least, I have never found any station yet that has grown small mouth 

 black bass in large numbers up to a size of four or five inches. We 

 have tried all kinds of ponds; we have tried all kinds of foods, and we 

 have not been very successful with any of them. But we have not 

 given up, though we might have if we had not been fortunate enough 

 to get the resident fishermen's license, which has given us some money 

 to carry out fui-ther experiments with the small mouth black bass. 



I would like to give you the benefit of some of the experiences of 

 some of the men in Pennsylvania in regard to the black bass. Some 

 years we raise some, other years we do not. We have one pond that 

 comprises an area of about half an acre, the depth of the water being 



