Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ENEMIES OF OVA. Now, supposing the nest to be made, and the ova deposited therein, how many of them will ever come to life, or grow up to be fish fit for human food 1 As in the case of Virgil's bees, we hear with sorrow, Turn varia illudunt pestes. What a catalogue of these pests of the water to the new-born, tender, and helpless little salmon, can we enumerate! Let us examine these in detail. First, accidents at the time of spawning. Many of the eggs do not get properly im- ENEMIES OF FISH EGGS. 43 pregnated at the time of spawning, or not being caught by the gravel, are washed away constantly by the stream. Then down come the floods and overwhelm the nests with mud and rubbish, or else sweep them bodily away, level to the bed of the river. Here is a case in point: Mr. Buist writes in The Field, March, 1863, From eighteen salmon and twenty-two grilse we had filled our breeding-boxes with 275,000 ova. Immediately after our ponds were filled the rivers came out in great floods, which dispersed the salmon, and, it is feared, that as these floods continue till the end of December, the fine appearance of fish would come to little account when left to all the contingencies of spawning in the rivers. The 310 fish not spawned would all be ripe within ten days, sothat from those left to their natural course there would not have been so many fecundated eggs from the 310 as we have in the breeding-boxes from the forty fish. All these fish -were caught on one ford where the Almond joins the Tay. Then again, we have the reverse of floods ?we have droughts; and the nests made when the water is high become bare and exposed to the air when the water goes down; either the eggs die from this cause, or else the young when hatched out, having no water, ref...