Fry striped bass, Roccus saxatilis (Walbaum)" were hatched at the Weldon, North Carolina State Fish Hatchery from eggs obtained from hormone-injected females collected from commercial pound nets in Albemarle Sound, North Carolina. The fry were packaged when two and three days old in conventional square (15" x 15" x 22") plastic bags with an oxygen atmosphere and shipped to Arkansas by airplane in insulated containers. Two hundred thousand (200,000) fry were held in each of two 58-gallon aquaria at the Joe Hogan State Fish Hatchery, Lonoke, Arkansas, for six days. Frequently changed, filtered pond water was used. At the end of six days when the fry were eight and nine days old and were swimming horizontally and feeding, they were released into a seven and one-fourth (7.25)-acre nursery pond. Total mortality during the entire operation from the time the fry were packaged in the plastic bags in North Carolina until they were released in the nursery pond in Arkansas was estimated to have been less than seven per cent. Upon draining the nursery pond sixty-three thousand six hundred seventeen (63,617) fingerlings were harvested (seventeen per cent of total estimated fry stocked). These fingerlings were planted in Dardanelle Reservoir on the Arkansas River.
