NATURAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN LOBSTER. 377 



The importance of the law of survival to the operations of the fisheries, and espe- 

 cially in its bearing upon some of our present illogical laws, is the only excuse for dwelling 

 upon it at this length. To illustrate further: With respect to period of maturity and 

 value to the fishery, all lobsters in the sea may be divided into three classes — (i) the 

 young and adolescents, mainly from egg or larva, to the 8-inch stage; (2) intermediate 

 class of adolescents and adults, 8 or 9 to loK inches in length; and (3) large adults, 

 mainly above lo^ inches long. The biological value of the individual increases with 

 every stage from egg to adult of largest size, and therefore is greatest in class 3. The 

 present laws sanction the destruction of class 3, but class i, the beginning of the series, 

 must, as we have seen, be mainly recruited from this class or from those animals which 

 under present conditions are being wiped out. In other words, our poUcy shifts the duty 

 of maintaining the race upon the small producers, which the law of survival plainly tells 

 us it is unable to bear. There is no way of getting over this grave defect. 



We speak of the "living chain" from egg to adult, but the metaphor is not a 

 happy one. There is no "chain" relation in living nature, only a succession of indi- 

 viduals, of individual eggs, united in origin but discrete in each generation. The embry- 

 ologist begins with the egg, but the fish culturist with the egg producer. Spare the 

 egg producer, then, and nature will save the race. We can not wholly take the place 

 of nature in dealing with the eggs, but we can defeat the ends of nature by killing the 

 "bird" which lays them. 



But, do you say, "We have the egg lobster law, and the protection of lobsters 

 in spawn should remedy our difficulties?" In reply we have but to recall the fact that 

 adults lay their eggs but once in two years, and consequently we should not expect 

 to find more than one-half of this class with spawn attached to the body at any given 

 time. This at once reduces the protection aimed at in the egg lobster law by one-half. 

 The other half shrinks to small proportions when we consider that there is an overlap 

 of four weeks in July between the climax of the periods of hatching and spawning, 

 when the majority of all adult female lobsters are without eggs of any kind, and also 

 when we further consider the ease with which a fisherman by a few strokes of the hand 

 can make a berried lobster eggless. 



When analyzed in the light of the law of survival, the showing of the lobster hatch- 

 eries is not very encouraging. The hatching and immediate liberation of the fry has 

 been practiced for many years in Europe, where experiments were made in Norway 

 as early as 1873, as well as in Canada and the United States. The whole number of 

 fry hatched and liberated on the Atlantic coast for a period of ten years, according 

 to official returns from the hatcheries of the United States, Canada, and Newfoundland, 

 reached a grand total of 4,214,778,200. Detailed statistics are given in the following 

 table." 



a H. F. Moore, of the United States Bureau of Fisheries, to whom we are indebted for collating these statistics, says that no 

 definite annual records appear in the official reports of Newfoiuidland for 1896 and 1897. The number of fry for each of these 

 years is stated to be an average of the output for the seven preceding years. 



