86 Thirty-fifth Annual Meeting 
caught at every point along our coast line. According to his es- 
timate there are twice as many illegal whitefish caught in Michi- 
gan waters today, in number, I mean, as there are legal whitefish 
—in other words, two-thirds in number of the catch of whitefish 
today in Michigan waters are illegal fish—and that very material- 
ly reduces the weight and value, because most of those fish are 
salted. As an illustration, last week our agent, while in Toledo, 
called at a fish house and while there they received a little con- 
signment of whitefish from a village on the east shore of Lake 
Michigan. It was a small lot, 800 pounds, but there were be- 
tween 1600 and 1700 fish by count. The shipper received three 
cents a pound, whereas for a four, or five or six pound fish the 
price would have been ten or twelve cents a pound. The great 
curse in the whitefish industry is the catching of the small fish. 
If that had been checked in the last ten years, the lines on my 
chart would not go clear beyond the paper. There is not a single 
commercial fish caught in Michigan where there is so great a 
percentage of immature, illegal fish taken as the whitefish. The 
ereat bulk of over 90 per cent. of the lake trout caught in this 
state are of legal size according to our agent.- But two-thirds 
of the whitefish by number are illegal fish. 
President: Of course, I did not mean that this increase was 
due to protection alone; but it was taken in connection with the 
work being done in propagation as well. There isn’t any doubt 
but that the work of propagating whitefish in the last few years 
has done a great amount of good. We all know around here in 
Michigan at least, that whitefish have begun to appear where 
they had disappeared because they had been cleaned out by the 
net 
