448 BULLETIN OF THE BUEEAU OF FISHERIES 



General ranr/e. — Both these hakes are exclusively American, occurring on the 

 continental shelf from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and banks of Newfoundland to the 

 Middle Atlantic States, the "squirrel," at least, being common as far south as Chesa- 

 peake Bay. 12 The most southerly record for it is off Virginia, while the white 

 hake has been reported off North Carolina, but very likely the former actually 

 ranges as far south as the latter. Both are bottom fish, occurring from near tide 

 mark down to about 300 fathoms. 



Occurrence in the Gulf of Maine. — These two hakes are very common fish in 

 the Gulf, where they are regularly caught side by side, and since the fishery returns 

 are simply for "hake" it is impossible to distinguish between them either with 

 regard to local distribution or to relative abundance. On the whole, however, the 

 white hake seems the more plentiful of the two in the Bay of Fundy, while our 

 own inquiries of fishermen, corroborated by personal experience, suggests that this 

 applies generally to the deep parts of the Gulf below 30 to 40 fathoms — for 

 instance to the deeper holes in Massachusetts Bay — and both Storer and Goode 

 and Bean (1879) spoke of the "white" as the more common of the two there. In 

 Ipswich Bay, on the other hand, we trawled 34 squirrel and only two other hake 13 

 in 22 fathoms on one occasion in July, 1912, and Welsh counted 6,450 squirrel to 

 652 white hake caught in the otter trawl on the northwest slope of Georges Bank 

 in June, 1912. The fact that our Gulf yielded something like 35,000,000 pounds M 

 of the two species combined in 1919 illustrates how plentiful hake are there. 



Both these common hakes dwell chiefly on soft bottom, few being caught on 

 the gravelly or shelly grounds so prolific of cod and haddocks, and neither species 

 is taken among rocks. We believe from our own experience that the white hake is 

 more strictly a mud fish than is the "squirrel." The difference in the types of bottom 

 frequented by hake on the one hand and by cod and haddock on the other is clearly 

 reflected in the statistics of the catches, for Georges Bank contributed only about 

 112,000 pounds and Browns less than 90,000 pounds of hake to the total just 

 mentioned. No doubt these few fish were caught well down the slopes, fishermen 

 assuring us that it is rare to catch a hake on the shoaler hard-bottomed parts of 

 the banks, whereas they are found very plentiful when a line trawl runs off in deeper 

 water, particularly off the northwest face of Georges Bank, and it has long been well 

 known that there is an abundance of them all along the southern slope of the bank 

 below 60 to 70 fathoms. Hake are also very plentiful in the South Channel, whence 

 about 2,000,000 pounds were landed in 1919, and they are so abundant on the lower 

 slopes of all the banks and ledges in the inner parts of the Gulf, as well as on the soft 

 mud floors between them, that many are taken all around the coastal belt wherever 

 the bottom is suitable. Massachusetts Bay, for example, yielded no less than 

 750,000 pounds for the year in question, but hake, like cod, become scarce going up 

 the Bay of Fundy, as the fishery returns prove. 



The chief centers of abimdance inshore lie off the southwestern coast of Nova 

 Scotia, at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, along the coast of Maine between Machias 



'■ Field notes by W. C. Schroeder. of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries. 



" The latter were listed by Welsh as U. regius, but probably they were actually white hake. 



11 The exact figure can not be given because hake are combined with cusk in the Canadian returns. 



