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The Natural History and Habits of the Salmon
The Natural History and Habits of the Salmon Author:Andrew Young 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: may be too much flooded, so that the fish may be forced to deposit their seed on banks that are always dry in an ordinary state of the river; therefore, that par... more »t of the seed is lost; or the rivers, by means of a continued frost, may be low, and the principal spawning fords ice-bound from top to bottom, as often happens in December: in that case, of course a great part of the ova must be lost; for, although the fish have the power of spawning when the seed is ripe, they are entirely devoid of the power of retaining it after a certain time. Or if large floods should happen at the latter end of the throng time of spawning, particularly if it does so before the beds are fairly covered up or sadden down, they are liable to suffer a good deal from being carried away. In 1848, the northern rivers were actually full of fish during summer and harvest, — no fish being caught in the rivers that summer; the first part of the spawning season was good, and the operations were very satisfactory. But the awful floods that happened in January following carried off banks and beds, and swept the whole seed into pools, where it was covered over by the debris of the flood, and thereby lost. We have now described the spawning process, and left the seed covered up in the beds, so as to follow tne parent fish down the river to the sea, their feeding-ground, and back again to the native river, also describing their progress and growth during that time. We shall now return to the Spawning Beds. We have already said that when the ova is deposited and impregnated by the milt, it is covered up among the gravel, and left entirely uncared for by the spawned fish. Whether nature has formed these fish with an idea of the time their young require tolie in this hidden state, before they appear abroad in the ...« less