194 Thirty-ninth Annual Meeting 



of the men at a field station has been transferring perch fry to a station 

 pond and raising them for bass food. 



Mr. Ward T. Bower: The reason why I referred to possil)le trouhk-s 

 in connection with the propagation of yellow perch is that Mr. Clark 

 has on two or three occasions called attention to the difficulties exoeri- 

 enced in handling the eggs in jars, and I thought this might bring out 

 something of benefit to him and others who may have had similar 

 troubles. 



Mr. Clakk : Our experience in hatching yellow perch has been so 

 limited that I do not think it is of any great value. I may say, however, 

 that Mr. Thayer, foreman of the Detroit hatchery, placed the eggs in 

 jars and undertook to hatch them in the way that is said to be so easy 

 and they all died. However, wlien we suspended the ribbons in the 

 jars we hatched from 80 to 95 per cent. At any rate we assumed 

 that we hatched a1)out 90 per cent because this proportion showed the 

 eye spots and the mo\ing fish. Xo doubt as Mr. Titcomb says it is 

 an easy matter to hatch perch eggs provided the ribbons do not settle 

 to the bottom of the jar. 



Mr. Meehan : We do not string the ribbons across the jars but put 

 them in the same way as other eggs, and we have no trouble at all. 



Mr. Clark: I would like to hear from Mr. Lydell on this subject. 



Mr. Lydell : I did not intend to say anything about the yellow perch. 

 I am hardly ready. We have been experimenting with them at the Mill 

 Creek station a couple of years and have five hundred breeders there at 

 and the fry. The eggs hatched most successfully the past season and 

 were handled in this way: we placed two ribbons in each jar and kept 

 them there until two or three days before hatching, when they were 

 transferred to our large fry tanks. Seine twine was strung back and 

 forth across these tanks about an inch apart and the same distance 

 from the bottom, thus forming a rack for the ribbons to cling to or rest 

 on. When everything had disappeared from the twine we knew we had 

 a large hatching percentage. But when we held the eggs in the jars 

 until they hatched, the fry in the bottom found it very difficult to swim 

 up through and escape from the gelatinous mass. They became tan- 

 gled up and smothered. Nearly half of the hatch was lost in this way, 

 which is not very profitable. 



This season I tried a galvanized tank for hatching perch. This tank 

 has three sets of wire trays in it, half inch mesh, on which the spawn is 

 placed. The water is introduced from the bottom of the tank, which is 

 rounding, and in such a way as to insure uniform circulation. This 

 worked to perfection until the eggs hatched, when if we did not take the 

 fry out they commenced to die. Then I introduced another pipe to 

 carry the young fish up and out with a strong current of water. This 

 worked well with not to exceed a million of eggs in the tank. But that 

 is not entirely satisfactory, because we want a tank that will handle 

 10.000,000 eggs. 



We hatched and distributed five or six million fry at Mill Creek 

 this ye^r, and are now working on a plan to raise them to fingerling 



