FISHERIES, GAME AND FORESTS. 



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sparingly, over a considerable distance, all will find sufficient food to sustain them 

 until they grow and drop down to fresh pasturage. A daily newspaper in central 

 New York had on its front page last spring a large illustration of how baby fish are 

 planted. The legend should have read " How baby fish should not be planted." The 

 illustration was from a photograph, and men were shown in the act of turning trout 

 fry into a great, raging stream like a young river, and the empty cans proved that 

 some 20,000 or 30,000 trout fry had been dumped in that current in one spot. There 

 had been no attempt to follow nature by going to the headwaters, as the spawning 

 trout would have done, and the fish had not even been distributed so that the sur- 

 vivors that escaped the maws of their larger brethren lying in wait would have had 

 a slight chance to get one or two meals before they starved to death for lack of food. 

 The man who made the planting that was photographed will doubtless report later 

 that fry are not suitable for planting. They are not, nor are fingerling or yearling, 

 if those who do the planting will not take the trouble to plant them properly — 

 removed from their enemies as far as possible, and where food abounds. Trout need 

 food as much as a cow, a horse or a man, and will not thrive in its absence. Trout 

 do not live on water any more than man lives on air. 



The public hatcheries cannot rear to the fingerling stage ail the fry they can hatch 

 for lack of water. Fifty gallons per minute, of water below a temperature of 60 

 degrees Fahr., will carry 100,000 trout to the age of four months, but from six months 

 of age to a year the same number of fish should have 200 gallons of water per minute, 

 and it will be readily seen that some portion, and a large portion at that, of the 

 annual output of the hatcheries must be planted as fry, but in planting artificially 

 hatched fry there is a distinct gain over nature of ninety per cent in the number of 

 fry hatched. No one can tell the per cent of fry that survive and grow to the finger- 

 ling stage in a wild state, but in a hatchery eighty-three per cent of a certain lot of 

 fry were reared to yearlings. On the other hand, in distributing fingerlings, a public 

 hatchery will ordinarily grant an applicant 1,000, but if the same applicant should 

 ask for fry he would probably get 10,000, and 10,000 trout fry properly planted will 

 produce better results than 1,000 fingerlings improperly planted. If fry and finger- 

 lings are both properly planted there is no doubt that to produce the same result 

 many more fry than fingerlings must be used, but in either case much depends upon 

 the manner in which the fish are planted. 



A. N. CHENEY, 



State Fish Culturist. 



