FEDERAL FISH FARMING; OR, PLANTING 

 FISH BY THE BILLION 



By Hugh M. Smith 

 U. S. Deputy Commissioner of Fisheries 



IT was nearly forty years ago that 

 the United States Go^/i-nment ^rst 

 awoke to the necessity ot cciiLsrving 

 the aquatic resources of cne country, 

 and began those operations in behalf of 

 fishes, fishermen, and fish-eaters that have 

 now attained such gigantic proportions 



Several of the States had already 

 established their local fish commissions 

 or boards when in 1871 Congress took 

 the initial step toward a national fishery 

 service by the passage of a joint resolu- 

 tion creating the office of commissioner 

 of fish and fisheries. 



The early years of the Bureau of Fish- 

 eries were devoted to an investigation of 

 the condition of the fisheries of the At- 

 lantic coast. Great Lakes, and other sec- 

 tions ; to studies of the interior and 

 coastal waters and their inhabitants, and 

 to exploration of the ofif-shore fishing 

 banks. The cultivation of useful fishes 

 was soon taken up throughout the 

 country, and quid ly attained large 

 proportions. The natural expansion of 

 the work was materially augmented from 

 time to time by acts of Congress, and in 

 a comparatively short time the opera- 

 tions came to have a very wide scope. 



From year to year, as the importance 

 of the work has become increasingly evi- 

 dent, additional hatcheries have been 

 built, the capacity of existing hatcheries 

 has been enlarged, the scale of the opera- 

 tions has been extended, and new kinds 

 of fishes have been added to the output. 



Today there is scarcely a phase of 

 aquiculture, of the fishing industry, or of 

 biological and physical science as con- 

 nected with the waters, that does not 

 come within the purview of the bureau. 



CUIvTiVATlON OF F00D-FISHE;S 



It is conceived to be the better policy 

 to expend a small amount of public 



money in making fish so abundant that 

 they can be caught without restriction 

 and serve as cheap food for the people 

 at large, rather than to expend a much 

 larger sum in preventing the people from 

 catching the few fish that still remain 

 after generations of improvidence. 



Public or government fish-culture in 

 America exceeds in extent and impor- 

 tance that of all other countries com- 

 bined. However, the neglect of some of 

 the states to provide the minimum protec- 

 tion to certain species inhabiting inter- 

 state and international waters has not 

 only negatived the fi.sh-cultural work of 

 the bureau and of the states themselves, 

 but has practically inhibited it by prevent- 

 ing the possibility of securing an adequate 

 supply of eggs, thus making desirable and 

 necessary the placing of interstate and 

 international waters under the jurisdic- 

 tion of the general government. 



At the end of the first ten years of the 

 bureau's existence, the fishes that were 

 being regularly cultivated were shad, 

 carp, chinook salmon, Atlantic salmon, 

 land-locked salmon, rainbow trout, brook 

 trout, and whitefish, in addition to which 

 the propagation of several others had 

 been undertaken experimentally. The 

 list now is six times as long and the an- 

 nual output is ten times the aggregate for 

 the ten-year period ending in 1881. 



The main energies are devoted to 

 the important commercial fishes — shad, 

 whitefish, lake trout, Pacific salmons, 

 white perch, yellow perch, cod, flatfish — 

 and the lobster, which are hatched in lots 

 of many millions annually. More widely 

 popular, however, are the distributions of 

 the fishes of the interior waters which 

 are generally classed as game fishes. Al- 

 though representing only about 10 per 

 cent of the output of the hatcheries, this 

 feature of the work is very important, 



