Gloucester County Democrat. (Woodbury, N.J.) 1878-1932, 1901-05-23
Making Delaware shad.
From sundays Record

fish. She made last year there $1,000, 00C
shad in two months, and no doubt she will
make there this year as many more. How,
and why, does she perform such a work
Captain James A. Smith will tell you. He
has been for twenty years with the Fish
Hawk. which is the United States Fish
Commissions boat.
sFirst, says Captain Smith, 1--WE will
take up the question Of how the fish are
made. We will begin at the beginning,
and follow the operation through to the
end. The beginning is at Washington
Park, where Captain Albert Rice mans the
great shad seine. Let us go there"
At Washington Park half dozen OF
the Fish Hawks men were at work. A
haul of 1000 wriggling, silvery shad had
just been made by Captain Rice, and these
shad the half-dozen men were lifting, one
by one, from the net and stripping them.
To "strip' fish is to remove its roe, and
this must be done while the fish is alive, or
otherwise the roe is worthless for propagat-
ing purposes, being, like its parent, dead.
The Fish Hawks six men worked upon
the living shad with singular dexterity.
They would hold it with the left hand,
while the right would pass quickly down
the length of its belly, squeezing out
between the foreinger and thumb the roe,
the tiny, living eggs. One by one the shad
were taken up, despoiled of their spawn
and tossed, still living, back into the net
The roe filled slowly a huge tin bucket; it
was a pale, moist, granulated substance
resembling quicksand.
THE EGGS BEGIN TO GROW.
''We will go back now with the roe to
the Fish Hawk said Captain Smith
This was done, and there the roe was laid
out in little tins upon long table. Into
each tin a few drops of colorless fluid
was placed, and instantly, then, the little
eggs began to grow. Originally the size
of the eggs which we eat in our shad roe,
they had increased in twenty minutes to
an eighth of an inch in size. They were
now set in glase jars through which fresh
water ran, and in from four to seven days
they will change there into little fish.
The deck Of the Fish Hawk resembled
the laboratory of a chemist. 1t was
covered with black tables, and on each
table where the jars, two feet in height,
and one foot in diameter, with long tubes,
through which the water entered and de-
parted In each jar there were 100, 900
eggs, and there were 1856 jars.
FROM EGGS COME TINY sHAD.
The eggs were in all the various stages
atinous in appearance; they fioated, a
thick, revolving mass, in their jars, and
some of them were very tiny, while some
had swollen to the bigness of peas, and
within them, for their walls were trans
parent, the little shad could be seen, toss
ing and kicking, trying to break the shell
and emerge. And even as you looked, a
shell would burst, and tiny fish would
come forth and be carried by suction from
the parent jar, through a tube, into glass
aquarium.
The newborn shad is about the length
of the little finger nail. 1t is hardly
thicker than hair 1t has no more color
than bit of plate glass. Under its throat
is a globule, like drop of water that con-
tains nourisment, for the shad's mouth is
closed for three or four days after birth,
and were it not for the globule to sustain it
the tiny creature would die of starvation.
This globule, as soon as the mouth opens,
withers and falls off. The eyes of the
shad are dark. Like the tiny points of
black pins, they stare with a strange sharp
ness from the colorless head.
HATcING PROCESS EXPLAINED.
''The time it takes to hatch the eggs de-
ponds on the temperature of the water,
said Captain Smith ''With a tempera-
ture of 60 degrees the eggs hatch in seven
days; with temperature of 81, in six
days; with temperature of "a, in four
days. and SO on. These jars reproduce the
best conditions for Matching as they exist
on the river bottom. The eggs move gently
in the jars, just as the current would move
them on the bottom, and they have clean
Matching place here, such as their mothers
would have chosen for them.
Captain Albert Rice, with his father
and grandfather before him, has studied
the shad of the Delaware long time, and
he tells me the eggs are laid in places where
little cold springs gush up. These springs
keep the river bottom clean; there is no
mud there, but pure white sand. The eggs
in the river, though, are eaten by cells and
a hundred other fish, and it's very small
percentage of them that matches. The
eggs in these jars nearly all hatch. Only
10 or Is per cent. of them are lost
SHIPPED AWAY TO GROW.
"We ship the shad as soon as they are
a few days old to places favorable to their
growth. We are shipping them now in
milk cans, with 40, 600 in a can, to Lacka-
waxen, Calicoon, Port Jervis and Salem.
They will grow at the rate of an inch
month. By next November they will feel
able to take care of themselves, and they
will put out to sea. They will stay at sea
until they are full-grown, then they will
return to their native river-they always
return to the river they were born into
spawn. By that time they will be four
years old.
ave breed shad and other fish in order
to replenish our streams. Many rivers had
become almost barren of fish, when, in
1871, the Fish Commission was formed by
the work of the late Professor Spencer f.
Baird. Since then those barren streams
have become fruitful again. There were
no shad, for instance, on the Pacific coast
before the Fish Commission came into
being. The Commission planted few
fish in the Sacramento river, and there is
now not river on that coast which is not
well stocked with shad.'
The Fish Hawk was built in 1880. She
is 100 feet long, 81 feet beam and of 500
tons burden The vessel is white and clean
everywhere. The Fish Hawk traverses the
Atlantic coast all the year through, now
helping the sponge fisheries in Florida,
now the lobster fisheries off the coast of
Maine. Her mate, the Albatross, traverses
in like manner the Pacific coast, doing
lots of good work.