68 Thirty-Third Annual Meeting 
come up, collect in great quantities there and spawn, and both 
sexes can be caught ripe at the same time. 
Mr. Meehan: I would like to ask Mr. Stone whether he has 
ever found ripe eggs and held those eggs in an attempt to ferti- 
lize them later, keeping them for example all the way from one 
to forty-eight days. 
Mr. Stone: No, all were impregnated at once. 
Mr. Carter: The substance stuck to the eggs so that I could 
not wash them up. They formed a sticky mass like little pieces 
of half dried glue. ‘They stuck to the sides of the bucket, and to 
anything at all that was put in there, and it was impossible to 
break them apart without rupturing a great many eggs. 
As to the time to look for the sturgeon, you may expect them 
there from the 25th of May, on—they have been found ripe 
until the middle of June, I understand, in the sturgeon hole. 
At the mouth of the river they look for the blossoming of the 
shad-trees to determine the date of ripeness of the fish; and some 
farmers think when the apple-trees are in blossom the fish should 
be ripe. We also looked for a water temperature, of from 66 
degrees to 69 degrees, but none of those conditions seemed to 
bring along the ripe fish. I later found them in the sturgeon 
hole when they came up during the high water. 
Since taking up this work I have succeeded in securing some 
pamphlets from Washington relating the experiences of some 
German fish culturists in handling sturgeon eggs, and they had 
the same experience that I did, viz., that of having the eggs 
stick badly to almost anything they came in contact with, but IL 
believe they have been successful in a number of instances. 
Mr. Jones: I would like to inquire what the method of 
measuring sturgeon eggs was and whether or not there was any 
variation between the eggs taken from different sized fish. 
Mr. Stone: We used to count the number of the eggs in a 
fluid ounce in the ordinary way. Mr. Carter says he counted 
50,000 to the quart. ; 
The eggs used to vary very much indeed. Sometimes we 
would get eggs that were twice as large as others that were taken 
and sometimes they often varied very considerably. 
