PRODUCTION AND COLLECTION OF SEED OYSTERS 
203 
as the method of planting was fully described in the literature (Brooks, 1905, and 
Moore, 1897) it is not necessary to go into a detailed discussion of it. It is sufficient 
to state that the bottoms over which the shells are scattered must not be shifting 
and must be firm enough to support the weight of the shells. Obviously, the sand 
bars and soft mud bottoms are not suitable for the purpose and are never used for 
planting of shells. 
Very elaborate methods of seed collection are employed in Europe, Japan, and 
Australia. They consist in using various types of collectors such as brush, crates of 
tiles (France), bundles of hagel and ropes (Italy), bamboo (Japan), and stacks of 
rocks (Australia), which are placed over the bottoms and in the tidal areas. For a 
description of these methods, the reader is referred to the papers of Brooks (1905), 
Kellogg (1910), B. Dean (1892-93), and Roughley (1925). In this country experi- 
ments with artificial spat collectors were carried out in 1880-1885 by Ryder (1887), 
who used tile and slate coated with the mixture of lime, sand, and cement. All of 
these methods require considerable labor, and the cost of both material and operation 
is rather high. They can be used only in the countries where labor is cheap and the 
price of oysters is high. Under American conditions, where labor is expensive and 
the market price of oysters is low, the foreign methods of cultivation are not prac- 
ticable. The problem for American oyster culturists is to find an efficient but 
inexpensive and simple method of collecting seed oysters which would require the 
minimum amount of labor. 
BRUSH COLLECTORS 
Of various types of collectors, brush is the least expensive. The first use of 
brush in America was made in 1868 (Collins, 1891, p. 477) in the Poquonock River, 
Conn., when a farmer, after trimming his orchard and throwing the branches of the 
trees into the river, found them in the succeeding autumn covered with oysters. 
This suggested the employment of the method by others, and for several years it was 
known as the “brush” or “Poquonock” method. It was, however, only moderately 
successful and later was discontinued. 
During the last 10 years several attempts were made to plant brush in Great 
South Bay, but the results were not entirely satisfactory; setting was generally light 
and only a small number of young oysters were found attached to twigs. 
In the waters of North Carolina and Georgia, where setting is heavy and occurs 
between the tide marks, brush can be easily planted by sticking it into soft mud on 
the flats. The experiments with brush carried out in 1926 and 1928 in North Carolina 
and Georgia (Galtsoff and Luce, 1930) have demonstrated both the possibilities and 
the limitations of this method. 
WIRE BASKETS 
Since the beginning of shell planting in 1855, only a few attempts were made to 
improve this method. In 1910 Belding (1911), studying the setting of spat in Well- 
fleet Harbor, Mass., used collectors consisting of from one-half to one bushel of shells 
placed between the tide lines and covered with galvanized wire netting of 1-inch 
mesh, securely fastened to the bottom by four short stakes. The height of the shell 
heap was 8 inches ; the collectors were used only for a study of the intensity and dis- 
tribution of setting; and the method was not tried on a commercial scale. In 1925 
Capt. C. E. Wheeler, of the Connecticut Oyster Farms Co., suggested the use of wire 
baskets filled with oyster, clam, and mussel shells and placed on the flats. Experi- 
ments were carried out by Prytherch at Milford, Conn., and proved a success (Pry- 
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