FISHERIES, GAME AND FORESTS. 24I 



for they say: " Thus the specimens from Wood River, Idaho, * * * have 



usually no red dash under the jaw. Some specimens show traces of the latter, and in 

 such cases it is usually faint and irregular." It will be observed that the trout figured 

 in the colored plate has but a dash of faint red under the jaw. The drawing was 

 made from a fish reared at the Caledonia hatching station of this Commission, and I 

 examined a number of individuals before selecting the one from which Mr. Denton 

 made this drawing, and none had the red splash more pronounced than is represented. 

 Commissioner Babcock, who has caught the fish in Snake River, tells me that in 

 examples from that stream the splash is a deep blood red, and the fish is probably the 

 variety known specifically as S. mj'kiss leiuisi, in which the red throat mark is always 

 present. Some varieties grow to great size, twenty to thirty pounds, but the ordinary 

 maximum is about five or six pounds. In the West they spawn from May to the 

 middle of July, and their eggs are heavy and non-adhesive like the native Eastern 

 trout, and the same size, one-sixth of an inch in diameter. They are more prolific 

 than the common brook trout, averaging from 1,000 to 6,000 eggs, which hatch in 

 forty-five days, with a water temperature from fifty-two to sixty degrees. 



At Caledonia station in this State (the only place, I believe, where the black 

 spotted trout has been reared in the East) this fish begins to spawn before the middle 

 of March and continues for two months. The impregnation of eggs is from ninety to 

 ninety-five per cent., but just before the hatching period a large number of the eggs 

 burst and the embryos are lost. There is loss, too, between the hatching and feeding 

 times, and the fry do not feed as readily as the common brook trout; so that 

 altogether Mr. Annin, the Superintendent of Hatcheries, estimates the total loss 

 between impregnation of the eggs and feeding of the fry as about forty per cent. 

 After the fry begin to feed, they are not more difficult to rear than the fontinalis. 



TI)e ateelljead. 



This fish, called salmon trout on the Pacific Coast, is the only trout we have that 

 is entitled to the prefix salmon, although the lake trout, namaycush, has been called 

 salmon trout so long that it is most difficult for even the lawmakers to dispense with 

 the name salmon and recognize a trout which never goes tc salt water and is found 

 only in deep, clear, cold-water lakes as a plain lake trout. The steelhead has been 

 introduced into the waters of New York since the red throat trout, to which with 

 the rainbow it seems to be related more or less closely. In the State ponds it is some- 

 times a problem to separate the steelhead from the red throat or rainbow, by looking 

 at them as they are dipped out in a net, for at certain seasons there is a strong family 

 resemblance. 

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