52 CONFERENCE OF GOVERNORS. 



infancy being now past, one lobster at this stage is worth many 

 thousands in the first. Therefore, our eSorts, to be of real avail, 

 should not end with the hatching and immediate liberation of the 

 fry; we should rear them to the bottom-seeking stage. 



(g) What is the death rate or the rate of survival in the lob- 

 ster ? Upon the answer to this question hinges the gauge or legal 

 length law, as well as the expensive practice of hatching and turn- 

 ing loose the young, which has been pursued in this country and 

 Canada for many years (since 1886 in the United States and since 

 1891 in Canada). 



As was pointed out ten years ago,^ too many fish culturists have 

 been content to turn out so many thousands or millions of eggs of 

 lobsters and fish, and confidently expect results, to the neglect 

 of the most important question of the whole business, — the rate 

 of survival in the young set free, or the number of adults which 

 can be raised from them, the very end for which all the time, 

 trouble and money have been expended. 



In the popular mind, an egg is an egg, like that of the fowl 

 which we eat for breakfast. An egg really represents opportunity 

 or chance to survive, and its biological value to the race depends 

 upon the law or rate of survival, which was definitely fixed in 

 mature before the advent of man with his traps and hatching jars, 

 and differs in every species of animal and plant known. When the 

 gauntlet of life is long and hazardous, especially in infancy, nature, 

 as in the present case, multiplies the chances or multiplies the eggs. 

 Many eggs always means death, under natural conditions, to all 

 but a remnant of the host. The number of eggs alone serves as 

 a rough gauge to determine the rate of survival. 



At one end of the scale stand the birds and mammals, with few 

 eggs and the highest life rate Imown, secured by guarding and 

 parental instincts, with big yolks and rapid development in one 

 case and the special conditions of fetal life in the other. At the 

 other extreme we find a parasite like the tapeworm, where the 

 conditions of early life are so unpromising — since it must run a 

 long hazard of chances, and be eaten by two distinct vertebrates — 

 that its eggs are required by the hundreds of millions or even 

 billions. The lobster needs more eggs than the trout, and of 

 smaller size, but far less than the edible blue crab, which some- 

 times carries five millions of eggs attached to its body. Each one 

 of these is smaller than the dot over the letter i of ordinary print, 



1 Herrick, Francis H. . " Protection of the Lobster Fishery," Bulletin of the United 

 States Fish Commission for 1897, p. 221. Washington, 1898. 



