FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 497 



Color. — The dab is more constant in color than most Gulf of Maine flounders, 

 its eyed side, including the fins, being brownish or slaty olive tinged with reddish 

 and marked with large irregular rusty red spots. The caudal fin and the margins 

 of the two long fins are yellow, the yellow tail in particular being a very diagnostic 

 character. The blind side is white, except for the caudal peduncle, which is 

 yellowish. 



Size. — This is a medium-sized flatfish. Several hundred adults caught in gill 

 nets between Cape Ann and Cape Elizabeth (measured by Welsh) ran as follows: 

 Males, average length 15% inches, extreme 11% to 18% inches; females, average 

 18 inches, extreme 15^ inches to 21% inches. This series includes the largest 

 specimens that have ever been reported. 



General range. — North American coastal waters, from the north shore of the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence, northern Newfoundland (there are specimens from St. 

 Anthony's in the Museum of Comparative Zoology), and the Newfoundland 

 Banks to New Jersey. 65 



Occurrence in the Gulf of Maine. — The dab is a rather deep-water fish, seldom 

 seen along shore; and since its mouth is so small that one is rarely caught on the 

 large hooks used for cod, pollock, or haddock, little was known of its distribution 

 prior to the introduction of beam and otter trawls to the Gulf of Maine. Since 

 then, however, the dabs (known locally as " yellowtails " or "flukes") have proved 

 to be so plentiful along the sandy shores of the east side of Cape Cod Bay and on 

 Stellwagen Bank below 10 fathoms that they and winter flounders together sup- 

 port a considerable trawl fishery there. No statistics of the actual catch of dabs 

 are available (they are combined with other flatfish as "flounders"), but the Cape 

 Cod fishermen marketed almost 3,000,000 pounds of these two species in 1908 and 

 perhaps half of this amount were dabs. They are also common in the deeper parts 

 of Massachusetts Bay, as Goode and Bean (1879) long ago remarked, and so many 

 dabs are taken in gill nets (which are not very effective flounder gear) during the 

 spring fishery for haddock between Cape Ann and Cape Elizabeth, especially be- 

 tween the Isles of Shoals and Great Boars Head where Welsh saw many hundreds 

 during March and April in 1913, that this must be one of the commonest flatfish 

 in the southern part of the Gulf in suitable depths. 



Practically nothing is known of the abundance of dabs in the northeastern 

 waters of the Gulf, though they have been reported off Casco Bay and in the 

 Mussel Ridge Channel at the entrance to Penobscot Bay. Nor have our own 

 inquiries of local fishermen elicited much information, few of them discriminating 

 among the several offshore flounders. They are certainly rare and perhaps 

 altogether absent from the Bay of Fundy, for Huntsman has found them only in 



« This species is represented in north European waters by the European dab, L. limanda, a close ally, from which it is 

 distinguishable by its smaller scales, more pointed snout, more numerous fin rays, and shorter pectoral fins. 



We should also mention the deep-water dab (L. beanii Goode), for although it has not been taken within the limits of the 

 Gulf of Maine it would not be surprising to And it on the seaward slope of Georges Bank, for it has been taken westward and 

 southward from Marthas Vineyard in depths of 120 to 896 fathoms (the exact localities are listed by Goode and Bean (1896)) . This 

 flatfish is distinguished from the rusty dab by its much shorter head (occupying only two-elevenths instead of one-fourth of the 

 total length), by the fact that the dorsal profile of its snout is convex and not concave, that it has only about 64 dorsal fin rays 

 instead of 76 or more, that there are only 88 rows of scales along its lateral line instead of 90 to 100, and that its tail fin is marked 

 with a conspicuous black blotch on the outer rays at each side. 



