Foods and Feeding of Fishes 153 



Mr. Hayford : I have been writing during the last month to various 

 canners and people who put up fish, and I have obtained a great many 

 samples. It is in the analysis of these various foods that the chemist 

 has to play an invaluable part. I do not think it is in any sense a one- 

 man problem : you have to have the practical fish culturist, the chemist, 

 the biologist and the pathologist. As an example of what some of 

 these foods cost, we pay three and a half cents a pound for one type of 

 food delivered at the station, which means an expenditure of $9,000 

 a year for food alone at that one station. Where the fish culturist has 

 twelve or fifteen men, 160 pounds is about all he can handle if he wants 

 to keep things humming. That is where he needs the scientist to help 

 him. Our Department is going to let me have the services of Dr. 

 Embody from time to time, as he can be spared ; the present program is 

 that he shall be with us four or five days in every sixty in order that he 

 may check us up. Then when he can spend a longer period with us he 

 can go into these various matters further. One of the commissioners 

 asked me if I would like a couple of thousand dollars to spend next 

 year for investigational purposes, and I told him, no; that by putting 

 the problem up to Dr. Embody we might have attention given to some 

 of the vital points and might have him start right oflf in the direction of 

 the work, thus avoiding any delay of a year or so in waiting for results 

 in the larger field. I suggested recently that it might be a good thing if 

 we could all submit our problems to a committee of three, consisting, 

 say of two scientific men and one practical man, with the understanding 

 that the knowledge imparted to him would be treated as confidential; 

 then each year we might have considerable progress to report in connec- 

 tion with these various problems. We are doing certain work in New 

 Jersey; other States are going into these various matters; there is a 

 good deal of duplication of work. If these problems were put through 

 such a clearing house of scientific men and boiled down to something 

 definite, I am quite sure we would get somewhere. In order to raise 

 fish in large numbers, a gi-eat deal of fish food must be purchased, and 

 that costs money. We probably use 150 tons of food a year. I will 

 mention one thing we do which results in a little more economy in the 

 use of foods. We have one mixture in connection with which we use 

 this by-product of shrimp; if we did not use shrimp with a certain num- 

 ber of the fish we would average twenty-eight pails of twenty-five 

 pounds each, but by putting in certain quantities of the shrimp we bring 

 that figure down to twenty pails. The feeding of shrimp, etc., seems to 

 do one thing especially — it stops nipping. It has been my experience 

 that when fish start nipping at one another their systems are out of 

 order, and the administering of a wider variety of foods seems to 

 eliminate that condition and to make them more peaceable. 



Mr. Beard: A great deal of money is spent in more or less indefi- 

 nite experimentation, trying this, that and the other thing; and it does 

 cost money. If that money by some miracle, could be all taken together 

 and turned over to the right source, say the Bureau of Fisheries, and the 



