BIOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY 83 



one, the total would or could be correspondingly enhanced. Little attention 

 has been paid to this or any other regional fishery as a community of many 

 rivaling, competing, predatory, and mutually destructive species wherein the 

 rise of one is inseparably associated with the decline of others so that the 

 whole behaves as a body and in a manner entirely different from that of 

 any of the parts. Each species in its early stages of life drifts helplessly as 

 eggs, then as larvae; as such it is consumed by anything that feeds on drifting 

 life and itself consumes other drifters; as it grows it continues to devour 

 other species smaller than itself, is devoured by others larger, and until it is 

 consumed it is in severe competition with many other rivals. Nearly all the 

 destruction of all species occurs in the earliest stages of life, i.e., infant 

 mortality is by far the greatest m-ortality of every species and is the part of 

 marine life about which we know practically nothing quantitatively.- The 

 science of marine biology, up to now, has concerned itself mainly with the 

 exceptional survivors, the adults which have already escaped most of the 

 hazards of existence, have outgrown most of their enemies, and are in least 

 danger from them. We know very little in detail about the food of fishes 

 or the quantitative relation between the amount of food consumed and the 

 amount of growth, and what we do know is mainly derived from examination 

 of adult stomachs. 



It appears that until we know far more than we now do about the dynamics 

 of fishery production as a whole, especially at the level where most of the 

 discriminate and indiscriminate destruction occurs, "fishery management" 

 by public regulation is little more than vain presumption arising from rival- 

 ries and jealousies among fishermen and sportsmen, and designed principally 

 to assuage them. 



2. For extensive information concerning the food relationships of, and struggle for existence 

 among, the plankton or small drifters, see throughout and especially p. 97-112 of Bigelow's classic 

 work (1928) cited in Mr. Ellison's bibliography of the menhaden. 



