150 American Fisheries Society. 



discouraging. However, about three years ago, after Dr. Embody had 

 been with us about two weeks, we began to get tangible results. We 

 got them in this way: we started spending money — as Commissioner 

 Buller says, it is an expensive proposition. The first thing we did was 

 to dam up our water supply, or get it under control: by means of a 

 ten inch pipe a supply of pond or brook water which has been held back 

 is forced round into another pond of about three acres which is on a 

 lower level. I may say that probably few fish culturists have exactly 

 the same conditions as we have. Our ponds are mostly built by the use 

 of horses and scrapers, and our water fall is nineteen feet on our own 

 property in a distance of 3,000. That permits us to get good drainage. 

 We also have limestone water, in which most of the aquatic plants grow 

 profusely. After many troubles we have succeeded in hatching the 

 fry, and we get Daphnia and other minute organisms in sufficient num- 

 bers to feed the small fish until they are three-quarters of an inch to an 

 inch long. We found that when we got to that stage we were up against 

 it; and Dr. Embody suggested that we should try to raise mosquito 

 larvae. That would seem to be a big problem, but it is not as big as 

 it appears to be; the only thing is that you have to careful with the adult 

 mosquitos so that they do not get away from you, because you must 

 retain the friendship of your neighbors. We have overcome that by 

 taking the mosquito larvae and spreading them over ponds. These 

 bass soon became very tame, almost like trout. Then, as they grew 

 larger we substituted maggots — we can produce these, of course, in 

 almost any quantity. But the bass would not eat maggot as it dropped 

 from the fish waste, or whatever we wished to use, direct into the 

 receptacles; we had to let them drop into chopped straw and bran and 

 wiggle down through. When we did not adopt this plan the fish would 

 take the maggots in their mouths and then blow them out, but with the 

 use of the straw and bran they would not do that. Well, we took them 

 from an inch to an inch and a half on mosquito larvae and we got them 

 from an inch and a half to two inches and a half very nicely 

 with the maggots; then, of course, cool weather began to set in. We 

 then tried clam meal and shrimp from Louisiana, but that alone would 

 not bring about the desired result. We found that by getting a greater 

 density of plant life we could produce large quantities of shrimp and 

 Crustacea there, and by supplementing these two foods with such 

 amount of clam and maggots as they would eat, we could get them 

 from the two and a half inch period up to the four inch period by 

 October, We have not yet done this on a large scale ; and that brings us 

 back to Commmissioner Buller's statement that when you get to working 

 on a larger scale you have to have quicker methods. Our piping sys- 

 tem is such that we can drain the ponds containing these larvae direct 

 into the supply pipe ; we build our ponds generally on a higher level so 

 that we can open a valve in each one and blow this stuff into them in 

 order to add to the food that is already there. When we have food 



