12 FISH—-CULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 
See = EETEEEITE a alt ERE Ee Ta nL A 
the upper pond where the trout are more plentiful, and where 
the spring streams would afford food and protection to the fry, 
until large enough to run down into the two lower ponds. 
Mr. Jones feared they would interfere with the trout, and we 
compromised the matter by placing some in each pond. In 
the lower pond, where the sunfish are most plentiful, we- 
placed 3,500 young land-locked salmon, of an inch or more 
in length, by setting them out in the springs bordering the 
pond. We watched them, and saw the sunfish waiting for 
those which went down into the deeper water, but could not 
see that any were caught. The next day Mr. Jones captured a 
sunfish which had thirty-five young salmon in its stomach, just 
one per cent. of the plant! At this rate it would only require 
one hundred sunfish to consume the entire lot in one day, and 
we estimated that there were tens of thousands of sunfish in the 
large pond. 
About the middle of May, in this vicinity, the sunfish makes 
its nest near the shores or on shallows, by sweeping a spot 
twelve or fifteen inches in diameter in the gravel. The male 
and female occupy the nest and fight off all intruders. In the 
pond mentioned there is a spot near the flume where a space 
twenty-five feet long by fifteen wide contains over two hundred 
nests, lying as thickly as it is possible for circles to ie. On the 
first day of June I noticed that they were spawning, the female 
slowly turning round in the nest, and the male going around 
outside of her. They would come together and lie upon their 
sides, with their vents in contact and their heads apart, and, by 
motion of their tails turn round on a point of which her dorsal 
fin was the pivot. I incline to think that all the eggs are not 
laid at one time, but that altogether each female deposits from 
five to ten thousand eggs in the season. There are probably 
ten thousand such nests in Mr. Jones’s pond, as they can be 
seen all along the shores in from two to four feet of water 
seldom deeper than five feet. 
In the course of my fish-cultural life, 1 have been applied to 
many times by persons who wished to stock ponds with valuable 
fish, to know how to get rid of sunfish. They have often asked 
if explosion would not be effective, and I have told them that it 
