Fish Culture
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or PISCICULTURE, offthe artificial propagation of fish to set the destructive effect of fisheries. The art of fish fertilization is comparatively new. In 1763 Stephen L. Jacobi of Westphalia, Germany, devised the process now in use of stripping the ova from the female fish and mixing them with milt taken from the male. In 1850 the first government fish culture station was established in Huningue, Alsace. In the United States the art has made greater progress than in Europe. Dr. Garlick in 1865 began the propagation of brook trout, and New Hampshire imported salmon eggs from Canada to hatch in the waters of that State. Since then the various States have one by one taken up the art, till now nearly all have regularly appointed fish commissioners. Of the numerous inventions along this line, the most important is McDonald's fish-hatching jar, which keeps the eggs in motion, and automatically separates the dead fish from the living. The United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries was established by joint resolution of Congress, approved Feb. 9, 1871. It is placed in charge of a Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries, who is required to be a person of scientific and practical acquaintance with the fish and fisheries of the sea, coast, and inland waters. Reports are made annually to Congress. The scope of the work of the commission covers (1) the propagation of useful food fishes, including lobsters, oysters, and other shellfish, and their distribution to suitable waters; (2) the inquiry into the causes of decrease of food fishes in the lakes, rivers, and coast waters of the United States, the study of the waters of the coast and interior in the interest of fish culture, and the investigation of the fishing grounds of the Atlantic, gulf, and Pacific coasts, with the view of determining their food resources and the development of the commercial fisheries; compilation (3) the collection and of and the the statistics of the fisheries study of their methods and relations. See FISHERY.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 described fish culture as a remedy for over-fishing: state hatcheries stripping ova, McDonald jars, and a federal Commission of Fish and Fisheries created in 1871. That agency no longer exists under that name — it became the Bureau of Fisheries in 1903 and was folded into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940, with marine work later passing to what is now NOAA Fisheries. The bigger shift is in scale and purpose: what Collier's called a corrective to depleted rivers grew into aquaculture as a food industry, and by the mid-2010s farmed fish supplied more of the world's seafood for human consumption than wild capture. Meanwhile the confidence in stocking has cooled — hatchery-reared salmon and trout are now known to breed and survive less well than wild fish, so managers put far more weight on habitat and dam removal than on releasing fry.
Written for this edition, 2026.