186 Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting. 
of October we took the fish out and counted them, and there 
ere I1,200, 
Mr. Clark: In this connection I would like to state more 
fully and forcibly my idea on the rearing, or partial rearing of 
the bass. I think that a pond somewhere from three-quarters 
of an acre, to an acre in size, is better perhaps than a larger 
one, and can be handled easier ; if you are going into bass oper- 
ations on a large scale you should have a great many of these 
small ponds. The work of caring for them does not amount to 
anything. You have no food to prepare; no time is required in 
feeding ; and one man will take care of 200 ponds just about as 
easily as five or ten. All he has to do is to screen them, and 
the feeding operation is going on all the time. Of course, with 
your artificial food you may be able to get out a better per- 
centage, but we are looking for quantity as well as quality. I 
have been feeding fish for many years, but I am not prepared to 
say that the artificial food fish is as good as a natural food fish. 
Get back to nature, that is my plan; let them feed themselves 
and all the time. At Northville, instead of having the six ponds 
we have, there should be sixty, if we are going to do a great 
work, 
Mr. Lydell: I had arranged this spring to carry on experi- 
ments in regard to feeding young bass, but unfortunately just 
as | had my ponds stocked and the fry ready to be introduced 
into these small ponds, we had a flood there that put us out of 
business, practically, as far as the small mouth bass were con- 
cerned. We only used two ponds there for breeding them this 
year, and from those two I had 58,000 that I had to ship as fry, 
because I did not have rearing pond room for them, although 
we used all our ponds for that purpose except one for large 
mouth bass. 
In one of our ponds the chara weed was driven out by some 
other notorious brute of a weed that I do not know the name of, 
and there was no food there for the young bass. They did not 
seem to collect on the substitute weed as it did on the chara. I 
went around the shores of this pond and cleaned down probably 
five or six inches of dirt and spread white sand on that, and in 
a few weeks the chara came up through the sand and the other 
