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But if your watercourse should contain water-lice or aquatic larvae, it is a very easy matter to destroy them before putting in your boxes, with a little salt or quicklime. It is also desirable to cover your spawning-boxes with a wire grating, to exclude the light, and to protect them in severe weather from the chance of being frozen.
I am very particular in recommending spring rather than brook water, for several reasons. In the first place, brooks are liable to be flooded, and are sometimes so overcharged with sand and mud that the gravel in the spawning-boxes is completely choked with it and the spawn is lost, as I know to my great and frequent disappointments. At other times all is washed away together.
The fact is, that he deposited 40,000 in December, 1852, of which above 20,000 are now alive and in the ponds, varying from four to five inches long to two or three, notwithstanding that experiment was made under very unfavourable circumstances; for there was so much mud in the stream that supplied the spawning-boxes, that when Ramsbottom left Galway he was afraid all the ova would be choked by it.
In the third place, if you put your spawning-boxes in a brook, you will find it difficult to prevent the escape of the fry when hatched, and you are left in doubt as to the success of your experiment. With spring water all these inconveniences are avoided.
If he adheres to his own version, I would merely observe that there is no analogy in the two cases. But the inference does not rest upon mere supposition; the freshwater shrimps at Knowlmere were seen devouring the ova in the spawning-boxes. We have seen above that Par eat ova as well as Trout.
Before that time they are scarcely able to move, and thousands of them fall a prey, not only to the other fish, but to the larvae of aquatic insects which prey upon them very greedily. All these would be saved by proper precautions and well formed spawning-boxes, with good supplies of spring water to feed them.
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