THE OREGON SPORTSMAN 



established the habit of taking solid food. But facts are 

 accumulating that advise against this practice, the fish at such 

 an early age being too small and weak to withstand numerous 

 accidents of the environment, notably the voracious appetites 

 of fishes of larger size. The expedient has also been tried of 

 cutting the food supply to a quantity sufficient to maintain 

 active life, but insufficient for rapid and perfect development. 

 This has failed, also ; for it is obviously bad policy to rear fishes 

 by hand a day longer than is necessary to insure their welfare 

 in the streams that bear them to the ocean where they mature. 

 The more rapidly they grow, the shorter the period of expensive 

 probation at the hatchery. 



Several agencies contribute toward this latter result. A 

 great deal depends on the housing conditions. These may be 

 said to include the troughs, character of ponds, depth, flow and 

 temperature of the water, crowding of the fish, and so on. With 

 ideal conditions of this sort, however, there still remains the 

 item of food. Upon that the present paper would focus attention. 

 For the great desirability of increasing the efficiency and at 

 the same time decreasing the cost of fish food at the hatcheries 

 has instigated experiments whose results may be briefly reported. 



One of the foods that has been found to be adapted to the 

 needs of very young fish is beef liver. The custom has been to 

 feed it raw. Assuming the value of liver as a fish food, are the 

 best. results obtained by feeding it raw? 



The answer which our experiments give to this inquiry 

 appears best with the aid of a tabular view of the results. The 

 method of investigation consisted in dividing a given lot of 

 Chinook salmon that were just beginning to take solid food 

 through the mouth, into two numerically equal groups. These 

 were placed side by side in separate troughs, the flow of water, 

 temperature and all other conditions being as nearly as possible 

 the same for each — with the one exception of food. One group 

 was fed on raw liver, the other on an equal daily weight of 

 cooked liver. The weight of twenty fishes was taken at the 

 beginning and at the end of the experiment, the average weight 

 per fish being obtained in each case and the average gain per 



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