74 



BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES 



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41 



taken in the Port MoUer fishery are produced mainly in two small rivers — the Bear 

 and the Sandy, a few miles east of Port MoUer proper. Gilbert and O'Malley gave 

 cogent reasons for believing this to be the case, in spite of the opinion held by some 

 that the Port MoUer fishery drew upon the Bristol Bay runs to a greater or less 

 extent. It was believed by some of the men m the industry that in certain years, 

 if not in all, the salmon boimd for Bristol Bay approached the coast in the region 

 of Port Moller and thus were taken in the fishery at that point. The tagging experi- 

 ments carried out in 1922 and 1925 '^ proved conclusively that this was not true, 



and that the red salmon 

 taken in this region did 

 not belong in any appre- 

 ciable measure to the 

 Bristol Bay runs. Addi- 

 tional evidence of the 

 independence of the Port 

 Moller runs is given by 

 a comparison of the data 

 presented in Table 6 

 with those for Bristol 

 Bay. It is obvious from 

 such a comparison that 

 there is no significant 

 correlation between the 

 fluctuations in the 

 catches in the two 

 regions, as would be ex- 

 pected if they drew to 

 any great extent upon 

 the same body of fish. 

 These additional lines of 

 evidence, therefore, sup- 

 port the conclusion of 

 Gilbert and O'Malley 

 that the red-salmon 

 fishery at Port Moller 

 is dependent primarily 

 upon the runs supported 

 by the Bear and Sandy Eivers, and we can have no doubt that these are very 

 seriously depleted. The very limited supply has been greatly overexploited, and 

 it seems probable that the process of depletion is continuing even with the reduced 

 intensity of fishing that now prevails. Even under present conditions the intensity 

 of fishing is high, as is shown by the fact that, m the tagging experiments of 1925, 

 47.5 per cent of the tagged fish were recovered. 



" Experiments in Tagging Adult Red Salmon, Alaska Peninsula Fisheries Reservation, summer of 1922. By Charles H. 

 Gilbert. Bulletin, U. S. Bureau of Fisheries, Vol. XXXIX, 1923-24 (1924), pp. 39-50, Washington, 1923. Salmon- Tagging 

 Experiments in Alaska, 1924 and 1925. By Willis H. Rich. Bulletin, U. S. Bureau of Fisheries, Vol. XLII, 1926 (1927), pp. 

 109-146, Washington, 1926. 



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Fig. 11.— Catch of salmon at Port Moller 



