doing and we are doing a good job." But what we want 

 is additional research if we are going to have answers 

 to these problems. We have got to have additional 

 money to do it and that has got to come out of ap- 

 propriations made by the Congress. 



I can tell you right now that the Congress is not very 

 sympathetic and this means you are going to have to 

 get some political pull behind this thing. You are go- 

 ing to have to write your congressmen and tell them to 

 give these boys (NMFS) the money. Our organization 

 will try to spread the word when appropriations time 

 comes around. From the standpoint of the scientists, 

 obviously, I think we want them to do the work and 

 provide the information that's necessary to come up 

 with the rational management programs. However, I 

 think I would suggest at this time that, philosophical- 

 ly, the scientists are going to have a very difficult 

 problem. They have based most of their work in the 

 past on the concept of maximum sustainable yield, 

 having been trained this way, as this has been the cor- 

 nerstone of commercial fisheries management. I sub- 

 mit to them that this has been an inadequate philo- 

 sophy for rational management of sport fisheries. 



D. Lewis 



Thank you very much, Dick. I now call on Mr. 

 James Squire, who is a fishery research biologist with 

 NMFS in La Jolla, Calif. 



James Squire (USA) 



I am with NMFS in La Jolla though formerly I was 

 at the Tiburon Laboratory. You heard Dick Stroud 

 state that about 1960 the Marine Game Fish Program 

 was established and one of the laboratories that it had 

 started was at Tiburon, Calif., with which I became 

 associated in 1960. This laboratory was exclusively for 

 marine game fish and this function shifted to NMFS 

 in 1970, when there was a revision of programs. I 

 moved down to La Jolla with a program to study bill- 

 fish migrations through the tagging programs in the 

 Pacific Ocean area. 



There is concern for the billfishes in view of a new 

 increase in the utilization of these resources as in- 

 dicated by actual decline in the worldwide catch of 

 billfishes. As Dick Stroud pointed out, if you are to 

 attempt to manage this resource you must certainly 

 take into account the needs of the users, both sport 

 fishing and commercial. We manage these things in 

 different ways, the commercial fishery on maximum 

 sustainable yield and the sport fishery on large 

 numbers of big fish. These two concepts are in conflict 

 and will certainly have to be resolved in the future. 



In 1961 we became involved in billfish research in 

 the eastern Pacific Ocean, primarily life history work 

 and the tagging program, looking forward to the day 

 when such information will be needed to make 

 rational management decisions. We indicated at this 

 meeting the problem of obtaining good catch and ef- 



fort data and this is a field where a sportsman can 

 contribute greatly to research. We get good catch and 

 effort data from the Japanese commercial longline 

 fisheries throughout the world but the collection of 

 similar data from sport fisheries is very poor. What is 

 needed is better fishing logs, and people must be will- 

 ing to carry them and fill them out to the best of their 

 ability. 



The purpose of all this catch and effort data is to 

 show effectively the catch rate in the sport fishery and 

 how this is possibly being affected by changes in the 

 catch rates in the offshore commercial fisheries, which 

 sample a greater number of fish throughout the 

 eastern Pacific Ocean. I think we can say that the 

 sport fishery probably takes about one twenty-sixth 

 the amount of fish that the commercial fishery takes 

 in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Despite these good data 

 from the commercial fishery, one needs to know how it 

 is affecting the sport fishery if one is involved in any 

 international negotiations. You have to have the 

 scientific proof. This is the reason for encouraging 

 sportsmen and clubs to keep better records of catch 

 and effort. Not only are we interested in the days of 

 fishing with catches, but we are interested also in the 

 number of days when people go out and do not catch 

 fish. Using only days of effort which produce catches 

 does not give a true measure of what is actually going 

 on. 



We certainly need more data on environmental fac- 

 tors such as temperature and water color. As F. 

 Williams said here yesterday we are studying a living 

 animal in a moving environment and everything is 

 changing from day to day. We need to know how 

 billfish move in relation to the environment because 

 this may tell you why you are not catching fish. There 

 are possibly two reasons, either the environment is not 

 right for the fish, or the year class strength is low and 

 there are not many fish around. To determine which 

 of these factors is more important we must know 

 something about both. 



We need to know more about migration patterns 

 which sportsmen have assisted us with in the past and 

 are continuing to do. We must define the normal 

 range of the fish in the ocean, as this has a very 

 definite influence on the type of management you 

 might use for the resource. For instance, in the 

 albacore fishery of the North Pacific Ocean you can 

 take fish off Catalina, Calif., and then some 5 mo later 

 they will be south of Tokyo, Japan. You certainly can- 

 not just manage the fish off California, as the resource 

 is ocean wide. This is why migration studies are im- 

 portant. Another example would be the yellowfin tuna 

 in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Scientists have tagged 

 many thousands of them and found a north-south 

 migration pattern with very little east or west move- 

 ment, so they drew a boundary line at long. 130°W. 

 Does this hold for billfish or are they transpacific 

 migrators? This is one of the reasons for starting the 

 tagging program. 



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