158 American Fisheries Society. 



— small mouth bass we have had up to nine inches. That all shows 

 that food is the main thing in the propagation of fish. I have always 

 contended that if you want to rear fish and to get them growing fast 

 you must give them plenty of food, and if you use the right kind you 

 certainly will produce results. 



Dr. Embody: So far as the raising of bass is concerned, the whole 

 matter resolves itself into a question of producing the right kind of 

 food at the right time. If we can get the smaller animals — entomos- 

 tracans, let us say — in great abundance at the time when the bass are 

 fry, we will succeed at that point. Then we readily pass from that 

 stage to the size whei'e they require larger food, and mosquito larvae 

 would seem to answer the purpose there for a while. From that stage 

 they go gradually into the minnow stage. If we can produce minnows 

 or some other fish — orange spotted sunfish, goldfish, or buffalo fish, so 

 that they will be just about the right size when the bass are ready to 

 feed on them, we will have done something to meet some of these prob- 

 lems in bass culture. The question is how to make available the 

 different sizes of food at the right time, and what species lend themselves 

 best to that procedure. Here there will be a variation, of course, 

 according to the location. It may be that our friends in Kansas can get 

 grasshoppers in sufficient numbers to permit their being fed to the bass; 

 we could not do it in New York — we can hardly catch enough grass- 

 hoppers there to fish with. So we must resort to something else, and 

 mosquito larvae seems to come along about the right time; in fact, we 

 can keep it going all summer by using more of the material which pro- 

 duces the culture. As Mr. Hayford has pointed out, the greatest 

 problem there is to prevent the pupal mosquitos from reaching the 

 adult stage. We can feed them before they become pupae all right, 

 but if you allow a great many of them to become adults, they will 

 permeate the neighborhood and make bad neighbors. I cannot see any 

 objection to raising goldfish for the purpose of feeding the young bass 

 from the time they are an inch and a half long and on. In June I 

 happened to visit the goldfish farms in western Maryland ; if you have 

 never been there I advise you to go and see how these ponds are manip- 

 ulated. They have farms comprising anywhere from ten to fifty 

 acres, and it was a revelation to see the swarms of goldfish that were 

 crowded into these ponds. When I saw these fish it occurred to me 

 that there was what we needed to feed our bass. You will all remember 

 that our former member, Professor L. L. Dyche, advocated that very 

 thing in his book on "Pond Fish Culture"; that was the first time I 

 heard the suggestion made. It seems to me that the suggestion is a 

 good one. You can introduce the goldfish breeders into the ponds with 

 young bass; they can spawn there and it will not harm the bass. Young 

 sunfish will eat young bass; at least that is my experience. I do not 

 know whether the orange spotted sunfish will do it, but the common 

 sunfish will clean them up almost as fast as they are put in the pond. 

 Goldfish will not do that; they are quite harmless to the young bass. You 



