176 Thirty-Third Annual Meeting 
the way of producing food, purifying the waters and providing 
shelter for the young fish, that it would appear very desirable to 
have a free exchange of knowledge along this line. 
DISCUSSION. 
Mr. Stranahan: I prepared no paper for this meeting and 
I would like to say a little with reference to these aquatic plants. 
They are with us of the very greatest importance. We have 
had to make a good long fight of four years to know what to use 
and what not to use and how to use it. We have settled down 
to two plants, in neither of which am ! sure of the scientific 
name. Myrriophyllum is the name of one of them. That 
plant does well in our more fertile ponds. In the other ponds 
which are very sterile (sand, clay and gravel) we have found 
the parrot feather, one of the myrriophyllum family, I believe, 
a splendid plant for use. We have to plant it every year to some 
extent: it will get killed out unless it is looked after, but it 
offers us an abundance of cover; and we were derelict to the 
extent of losing quite a number of thousand of bass this year 
by not having planted our myrriophyllum early enough in one 
of our ponds. The parrot feather makes a good heavy cover 
for the protection of small fry, and furnishes a home for daphnia 
and cyclops, and all those crustacea that are good food for our 
little fishes. Where we have it we take out large quantities of 
bass, and where we do not have it we fail. I got these ideas of 
the necessity of a heavy cover from Mr. Leary’s ponds. I was 
sent by the commissioner to San Marcos to see Mr. Leary’s ponds, 
and with all due respect to his ability as a fish culturist—he is 
an industrious, hard-working man—a very large portion of his 
success, 12 my opinion, comes from his magnificent cover of 
myrriophylum. His ponds are right, his soil black and deep, 
and he has to mow his weeds to clean up his ponds. 
Mr. Leary: Yes sir, two or three times during the summer. 
Mr. Stranahan: We could not make myrriophyllum grow 
in our poorer ponds, and had to take the parrot feather. If we 
had that parrot feather in our richer ponds it would overrun us. 
We regard the matter a good cover as one of the three impor- 
tant points in bass culture referred to in my paper at Woods 
