view raw text
UPPER MISSISSIPPI RIVER FISH RESCUES With a record of 118,000,000 fish saved in ten weeks and two weeks work remaining, the government fish rescue crews on the upper Mississippi River, working between Bellevue, la., and Red Wing, Minn., have exceeded last years high record by 350 per cent, according to Superintendent C. F. Culler, director of the work, who is checking up on the operations. . "The results of the work thus far this season surpass all estimates," said Mr. Culler. "The work has been done with a small appropriation of 0,000, and by crews which never numbered over eighty-five men and now redueed to seventy. The saving is tremendous when computed from the standpoint of food value, and the results must impress the government officials." More fish have been rescued by these crews operating on the upper river in three months than all the federal hatcheries in the United States could propagate in a year. It is estimated that the total number of fish saved will be in the neighborhood of 130.000,000. "Only a beginning lias been made in this work," said Mr. Culler. ".All of the fisli rescued were caught in land-locked pockets, which were fast drying up or where the fish would have smothered when the sloughs froze over in the winter. We could not begin to seiiie out all these pockets. We just hit the high spots as we went along and passed by thousands of pockets whicli we did not have time to seine. I hope that the time will come when we can get them all."
