REARING THE YOUNG FRY. 171 



them at intervals of three or four hours, and keep them 

 in abstinence the rest of the time. When the young 

 fry have eaten enough is a question not easily settled, 

 although it has been asked very many times. I used to 

 think that they would not eat too much, and I cannot 

 now say that I ever knew of an instance of a death 

 caused directly by over-eating • and, as a general thing, 

 I still think there is more danger of not feeding 

 enough^ than of feeding too much. On the other 

 hand, overfeeding may possibly increase the liability 

 to disease, when the fish are very much crowded. I 

 do not believe that when there is plenty of room and 

 water, they will ever eat enough to hurt themselves ; 

 but when you have many confined in a small space, 

 I would advise the exercise of some caution about 

 overfeeding. 



The most destructive instance of the ravages of 

 disease in my experience was with the best-fed trout 

 I ever had. The contents of two boxes, twenty thou- 

 sand young fry, were attacked by parasites, which 

 swept them all off in one week. On Monday morn- 

 ing they were the most robust and best-fed trout I 

 had ever seen of their age, and on Saturday night the 

 whole twenty thousand were dead. No others were 

 attacked. I do not know that overfeeding had any- 

 thing to do with the appearance of the, parasites. I 

 only mention the coincidence for the benefit of future 

 observers, and would add that I think that over- 

 crowding the fish had much more to do with their 

 death than overfeeding. As a rule then, I repeat, you 

 need not be afraid of the young fry's eating too much. 



