Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/97

Rh more to the possibilities of our waters to supply us with food. The true fish conservationist should look forward to something more than the preservation or the protection of existing fisheries: in fact, his ideal may well be a development of fishery resources that is now scarcely conceived in the public mind. We do not want, in fisheries, a restoration of the past, but the inauguration of a future.

On every hand there are explanations of the diminution of the number of food-fish of the rivers; but surely this can be ascribed only in part to the causes of over-fishery or to other direct acts of man. One ultimate explanation, it may be confidently stated, will be found in those very conditions which have indirectly affected the flow of our great streams in so disastrous a way as to create a demand upon the government for the storage of waters and the regulation of the flow of streams. Deforestation, denudation, drainage—to these causes, among others, are ascribed the extreme flood conditions ensuing upon the development of the country, and to these likewise may be attributed a significant change in the condition of our rivers as bearing upon the natural reproduction and sustenance of fish.

The occurrence of spasmodic floods, of comparatively short duration and separated by intervals of extreme low water, have a deleterious effect upon fish life in manifold ways. The first realization of this fact comes with the observation of enormous numbers of young fish left in the overflow ponds isolated by the recession of the flood. The significance of the observation is not in any way grasped if we suppose that these innumerable fish were simply carried out by chance and left by a similar chance. The real phenomenon is this. The flood occurred when the breeding fish were seeking the shallow and warmer waters for the location of their nests and the deposition of the eggs. When the young from these eggs, together with the adults, are left to starve and suffocate and die in the disappearing or diminishing pools, we see, not the loss of a random proportion of the fish life of the stream, but the actual decimation of a generation. Consequently, it should be esteemed of high importance to reclaim and restore to the rivers the fish thus abandoned otherwise to destruction. Such overflow ponds are now, to be sure, a common source of supply for government and state departments seeking fish for general distribution. It is better that the "lost" fish should be used for some good purpose, rather than left to die, but, that our impression may not be confused, it should be remembered that the conservation of fish in the particular stream is regarded and promoted only in so far as the greater part of the fish are returned to the river, and this is done in some cases.

It may not and does not always occur that the flood comes just before the fish have begun to nest. It may occur while the eggs are yet