Transporting Live Fish

Many expensive tanks have been constructed for transporting fish alive, answering the purpose more or less perfectly. We give here a simple and inexpensive method: Take a barrel or cask, washed until it is clean and sweet. Fit a cover to it tightly to prevent the water splashing over while on the cars or wagon. A piece of canvass tied over the top, answers every purpose. A hole one inch in diameter may be made in the middle of the cover. Fill with water within six inches of the top, as the agitation of the water on the journey helps to aerate it. Tie some ice in a piece of flannel and fasten it to the side of the cask near the top so that it shall not swing about and bruise the fish, and the cold drip from the ice will sink to the bottom. If the journey is to be a prolonged one, fit the nozzle of a common bellows with a tin tube long enough to reach to the bottom of the cask, and by blowing a little now and then the fish can be carried thousands of miles. We do not give this as the best plan, but as a cheap and inexpensive method answering a very good purpose. The best apparatus would be a metal tank of some kind with double walls, permanent ice chamber in the middle, and automatic air-pump.

Young whitefish are in condition to transport from the first to the tenth of February; salmon trout from the tenth to the thirtieth; brook trout from February twentieth to April fifteenth and should be put in the small spring rivulets one and two feet wide, that supply the main stream. No man, while transporting fish, should go to sleep and allow them to be left alone while in the cans, as it will be sure death to them. A man may think he knows all about carrying fish, because he has carried a few minnows in a pail for fishing; but he will fail sure if he does not follow the directions to the letter. Six twelve-gallon cans filled with fish is all one man can take care of.

We use, ordinarily, the common milk cans, and have found them to answer. The water is aerated when fresh cannot be got by being poured from one bucket to another, held some distance apart. The older the fish, the more frequent changes of water they will need. In order to do this when traveling by railroad the water is drawn off by the syphon; make a tube 2 1/2 inches in diameter as long as the can, cover the bottom and 6 inches up the tube with wire lining and put the syphon in it when the water is drawn off. Draw the water as low as is safe, just before reaching the station, when fresh water can be turned in from the pump, or drawn from a hydrant. A milk can will hold about 7,000 whitefish fry, or 5,000 brook-trout fry, or 4,000 salmon-trout fry, according to the length of the journey and opportunities of changing the water. They will carry only about fifteen full grown fish of any species.

All fish should be deposited as near the head of a lake as possible, that they may not go into the outlet before they become familiar with the waters. The young fish should be deposited during the night when most large fish do not feed, and will find hiding places before morning. They can be transported much more easily and safely in cold weather than in warm.

In all operations with fish eggs we cannot too strongly impress on our readers the necessity for the utmost care in handling. Fish eggs are different from birds eggs and often have a tough tenacious skin, but they are as easily killed by rough usage as the shell of the smallest bird is easily broken by a fall. They should be moved and touched with the utmost delicacy, and never except on necessary occasions. It would be better if they had a thin shell, for then persons would more quickly see the fatal results of any carelessness.

Mr. Palmer's method. - Mr. Palmer, one of the most successful fish culturists of the West, has kindly furnished us the following communication describing his method of growing trout which differs a little from that in general use. He recommends the use of zinc troughs, but we doubt whether that metal would answer in all waters which might when loaded with certain substances have a chemical effect upon them that would be deleterious to the eggs. However, under his management and in his location they answer well:

For hatching of trout and salmon, I prefer zinc lined troughs, they are easily kept clean, and the fish are where they are wanted until they exhaust the food sac. While I can not hatch as many in this way as with the Brackett tray, or Holton box, I think I can hatch healthier fish.

My hatching troughs are twelve feet long and eighteen inches wide, and I hatch from fifty to eighty thousand to the trough. I run the water about an inch deep over them, and let on all the water I can without washing the eggs off.

I cleanse my water by settling it in deep boxes before it goes on the eggs. For the last ten or twelve years my trout fry have been remarkably healthy, prior to that I had lost them by tens of thousands, and think that the cleanliness and simplicity of the process has much to do with their health. My experience, not alone around my own ponds, but with others that I had occasion to visit, is that the longer trout are confined or domesticated the healthier their progeny becomes, and in this connection I would say that this applies to their pisciverousness or canibalism, I have one pond in which I have trout from two to eighteen inches long, and never see one devour another. Taming them for generations seems to take away their wild voracious nature; of course I would not recommend the raising of different ages together, and think when mixed together, if neglected, they would return to their old practice of living off one another.

Every trout breeder knows that the difficult stage with themis from the time they absorb their sac to the time they get to feeding well, and much of the trouble is to get them to eat.

Some ten years ago in my perplexity to find something that they would eat. I thought 1 would try a little sweet cream. Well, it floated off like oil, and I said to myself that " any fool might have known that," and set down the cream and went to thinking again. Next morning I went out, and whilst standing at the head of the trough thinking what I would prepare them for breakfast, I picked up the cream, which had frozen over night, and dropped a little in, and to my surprise it broke up into little fine particles, much like corn-meal, and floated on the water, and I had the satisfaction to see the little fellows grab it. Since then I have fed my fry with it for about two weeks, then mixed it with liver, and finally came to all liver. I think the secret of their taking to cream so kindly is that it is so easily swallowed, and have often watched my young fry struggling, straining and gasping, trying to swallow the smallest particles of meat.

I sell trout eggs at four dollars a thousand, and the young fish at eight dollars a thousand when they absorb the sac, and add eight dollars a thousand each month that I keep them. After that find I that this ratio brings them, when ready for the table, to about fifty cents a pound, the price at which I sell trout for the table.

I have land-locked Atlantic and Pacific salmon, and crosses between the Pacific salmon and the trout, but would not recommend them for pond culture. The trout will make much greater growth on the same food than they will, and do much better. I sell them at half the price of trout but never get an order duplicated.

I feed livers, melts, kidneys, and sometimes lungs of animals that I pay the butchers two and a half cents a pound for, yet my fish do not cost me as much pound for pound, as the beef and pork I raise. The reason is that I keep my ponds well stocked with insect-food. I would rather lose the use of one or two ponds at the head of the stream, and devote them to insect breeding, than to have the insect food fail, as by this means I not only raise my fish cheaper but get a better fish than those who feed exclusively prepared food.

Please excuse my tediousness in this description; I think fish culture worth a good deal of talk.

Yours,

A. Palmer.