THE PASSING OF THE STURGEON 369 



pounds in recent years, while the catch in Lakes Michigan and Erie 

 has fallen to about one sixtieth of its former proportions. In the 

 Delaware River district, the most prolific of all the sturgeon grounds 

 ever developed in this country, the depletion of the supply has gone 

 almost to the point of extinction. The total amount yielded from the 

 nets of the three states bordering the river and bay has dropped from 

 more than 5,000,000 pounds in 1890 to less than 350,000 pounds in 

 recent years. 38 A quarter of a century ago these waters still literally 

 teemed with sturgeon, and it was impossible to dispose of all that 

 could be caught. Then it was not an uncommon thing to see 1,000 

 or more sturgeon on the wharf at Bayside, New Jersey, with shipments 

 of five or six carloads in a day to New York or Philadelphia. In 

 recent years to see a score of sturgeon on the wharf at one time has 

 been a rarity enough to bring the fishermen from miles around to see 

 them, and if five or six boxes are shipped at the same time the shippers 

 think they are lucky. Less than twenty years ago 4,000 to 5,000 kegs of 

 caviar were shipped annually from the Delaware district and dominated 

 the market under the name of Russian caviar. But the total caviar 

 output had fallen to 726 kegs in 1899, 39 and at Delaware City, an 

 important center, where 422 kegs of caviar were prepared in 1895, 

 only six kegs were obtained in 1901, with even less since then, while 

 the price has been soaring above $1 per pound. It is a condition with- 

 out parallel in the annals of fishing. 



With the single exception of the smaller rivers entering the Gulf of 

 Mexico, where the fishing for sturgeon dates only since 1897, 40 all the 

 grounds show evidence of the same rapid depletion. On every hand, 

 declines of 90 to 95 per cent, in the last decade or two mean only the 

 one thing — that the end of the sturgeon is near unless the most active 

 and rigorous protective measures are speedily adopted. 



This amazing depletion of a fish once " marvelously abundant " 

 must be regarded largely as a natural or at least inevitable outcome of 

 the character of the fishery itself. More or less weight must, of 

 course, be given to the amount of wanton destruction of the sturgeon 

 by the river and lake fishermen of successive decades before the sturgeon 

 fishery was established on a commercial scale. Certain injurious and 

 wasteful methods of fishing have also been employed at times, the worst 

 of which was the use of small mesh nets both by sturgeon fishermen 

 and by others, destroying many young sturgeon, the use of the three- 

 pronged grappling hook dragged over the spawning grounds, par- 

 ticularly at the eastern end of Lake Erie, and most of all the unrelent- 

 ing pursuit of the fish during the spawning season. The object of the 



38 U. S. Fish Commission Report, 1888; 1896, p. 576; 1899, pp. 109, 372; 

 1901, pp. 511, 580; 1903, p. 345; 1904, p. 648. 



89 Pennsylvania Fish Commission Report, 1900, pp. 170-71. 

 40 Bureau of Fisheries Report, 1903, pp. 443, 455. 

 VOL. lxxiii. — 24. 



