FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 255 



Bay, on the one hand, or near the Kennebec River, on the other ; and while the shore 

 fisheries of the State of New Hampshire yielded 850 pounds of bass in 1889, none 

 at all were reported thence in 1919. 



Turning now to the Maine coast, there is ample evidence that in old days bass 

 were plentiful in and about most of the river mouths west of the Penobscot but less 

 so in those to the east. For instance, they were so numerous in the Kennebec and 

 in the shallow and partly inclosed bays and beaches near its mouth that 1,000 pounds 

 have been taken there on a single tide as recently as 1830, but bass were prac- 

 tically gone from the Androscoggin River -by 1860, and by 1880 the stock of 

 Maine bass had so diminished that the year's catch from the Kennebec River 

 had fallen to 12,760 pounds, with 8,000 pounds coming from the Sheepscot 

 River and a few from the St. Croix, the Penobscot, and Casco Bay, a total catch 

 of only 26,000 to 27,000 pounds for the entire coast of the State. Ever since then 

 bass have so constantly grown more and more scarce off the coast of Maine that 

 the catch for the entire State had dropped to 15,715 pounds by 1902, all taken 

 in and about the mouths of the Kennebec and Sheepscot Rivers except for two 

 hundred and odd pounds picked up south of Cape Elizabeth. In 1905 only 4,200 

 pounds were reported, all from Kennebec-Sheepscot waters, while in 1919 the 

 total catch of bass for the State was only about 600 pounds, nearly all from the 

 Kennebec. 



The stock of bass has maintained itself no better along the Canadian shores 

 of the Gulf of Maine. They were already scarce by 1873 in the St. John, where 

 they had been so plentiful during the first half of the century that bass playing on 

 the surface like porpoises were a familiar sight, 18 and although bass are still found 

 in the estuaries of the St. John so few are caught that they have not been mentioned 

 of late years in the Canadian statistics of the fisheries of the north shore of the Bay 

 of Fundy. A few bass still occur in the large warm estuaries and in the neighbor- 

 ing fresh water of the Shubenacadie and Annapolis Rivers, but only 700 pounds 

 were reported as caught on the Nova Scotian side of the Bay of Fundy in 1919, 

 and none at all along the western shores of Nova Scotia. 



Since striped bass have dwindled as nearly to the vanishing point in the St. 

 John (which still sees a bountiful yearly run of salmon) as in the estuaries of rivers 

 that have been dammed or fouled by manufacturing wastes, the chief blame for 

 its present scarcity can not be laid to obstruction of the rivers; and as this is a 

 very vulnerable fish, easily caught, always close inshore, always in shallow water, 

 and with no offshore reservoir to draw on when the local stock of any particular 

 locality is depleted by such wholesale methods of destruction as the early settlers 

 employed (p. 253), overfishing must be held responsible. 



Food. — -The bass is a very voracious fish, preying indiscriminately on small 

 fish of all kinds — herring, menhaden, shad, smelt, and such small fry as launce, 

 mummichogs, and silversides being its chief diet in inclosed waters — and hunting 

 for crabs, shrimps, lobsters, squid, mussels, and various other invertebrates along 

 open shores. 



> 8 Adams, 1873 (Fishes, Part 3. pp. 201-257). 

 102274—25 + 17 



