one outstanding offshore, long-distance migration 

 that was reported was when a dogfish that had 

 been tagged off Willapa Bay, Wash., in 1944 was 

 recaptured near the northern end of Honshu 

 Island, Japan, in 1952. This is a straight line dis- 

 tance of 4,700 miles, but the author concluded that 

 the fish probably followed a great circle route at 

 accustomed depths along the coastal shelf. Lon- 

 gevity of the spiny dogfish is suggested by the 

 above example, a fish at liberty 7 years, and two 

 other fish tagged in the same experiment, which 

 were at liberty 8 j'ears and 10 years, respectively. 

 Dogfish tagging experiments in the Northwest 

 Atlantic have been reported by Templeman (1954, 

 1958) for the. Newfoundland-Grand Bank area and 

 by Jensen (1961) for the Gulf of Maine-Georges 

 Bank and Browns Bank areas (fig. 3). In the 

 Newfoundland experiment, 279 females were 

 tagged near St. John's in July 1942, and, as of 

 September 1949, 14 fish (5 percent) were recap- 

 tured. Many of the tagged fish were caught in the 

 local area and the Maritimes, but two were caught 

 off Gloucester, Mass. (one in 1942 and one in 



1943), a distance of 900 miles, and one was caught 

 off Cape Henry, Va., in 1947, a distance of 1,300 

 miles. The last return was from the Strait of 

 Canso, Nova Scotia, in 1949. Templeman noted 

 (1954), ". . . most of the tagged fish were mature 

 females carrying young and the recaptures show 

 a southward late fall movement of some at least of 

 these large pregnant females, with presumably a 

 compensating northward movement in the spring 

 and early summer." In an earlier report (1944) 

 he suggested that the dogfish migrate rapidly and 

 for long distances in the upper layers of the water. 



While the tag returns reported by Templeman 

 indicated a coastwise migration, he did report an 

 astonishing offshore migration from a later tag- 

 ging experiment (Templeman, 1958) . A fish that 

 had been tagged on the southwestern slope of the 

 Grand Bank in June 1947 was recaptured in Faxa 

 Bay, Iceland, in August 1957. The straight line 

 distance between the tagging area and the point 

 of recapture is over 1,300 nautical miles. 



Returns of dogfish tagged in the Gulf of Maine 

 area have done little to confirm either a north- 



70° 65° 60° 55° 



Figure 3. — Results of dogfish tagging in the Northwest Atlantic 

 LIFE HISTORY OF SPINY DOGFISH 



50° 



45° 



533 



