PISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 165 



General range. — Temperate parts of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, 

 known in the open sea as far north as northern Norway off the European coast, 

 and to northern Nova Scotia"" and the Banks of Newfoundland off the eastern 

 American coast. 



Occurrence in the Gulf of Maine. — While a straggler to our Gulf from warmer 

 waters offshore or farther south, the needlefish has been taken more often on the 

 northern coasts of New England than have any of its relatives, specifically on 

 Cape Cod, at Provincetown, at several locations in Massachusetts Bay, at Annis- 

 quam a few miles north of Cape Ann, at Old Orchard (Maine), in Casco Bay, at 

 Monhegan Island, and among the islands at the northern entrance to the Bay of 

 Fundy, but we find no record of it along the Nova Scotian shore of the Gulf of 

 Maine. Apparently the inner curve of Cape Cod from Provincetown to Wellfleet 

 is a regular center of abundance for it, as Storer long ago remarked, for schools 

 of billfish are picked up in the traps along that stretch of beach almost every year, 

 the catch rarely amounting to hundreds of barrels, while hosts of them have been 

 known to strand there. Its numbers fluctuate greatly from year to year, however, 

 and it often fails to appear."' 



As a rule either many or none at all are caught, their appearance being so 

 sporadic that they can not be looked upon as regular summer residents. They are 

 taken any time from mid-June to October or November, the largest catches usually 

 being made late in summer."^ Curiously enough, although skippers are often so 

 plentiful in that particular locality they are so rare farther within Massachusetts 

 Bay that many fishermen from Plymouth to Cape Ann had never heard of them, 

 although others had. Certainly we never saw nor heard even a rumor of the 

 fish in many summers spent at Cohasset, and so far as we have been able to 

 learn it is only a stray in the Gulf of Maine north of Cape Ann. It would not be 

 surprising, however, to encounter a large school anywhere within its limits, for at 

 Woods Hole, where the billfish is ordinarily very rare, it has been taken in large 

 numbers on two occasions (1905 and 190G). Witness, too, its occasional abundance 

 off northern Nova Scotia.°° When it does invade the waters of the Gulf of Maine, 

 it may be expected in multitudes, for it usually travels in vast schools. Day,"^ for 

 example, mentions the capture of 100,000 in a single haul in British waters. 



Habits. — The skipper is strictly pelagic. So far as known it lives exclusively 

 at the surface, so much so that in English waters, where it is plentiful in summer, 

 few are caught in nets set as deep as a fathom or two. Its hordes are preyed upon 

 by porpoises and all the larger predaceous fishes; cod and pollock, for instance, feed 

 greedily upon them, as do bluefish. When they strand on the beaches, as often 

 happens, it is probably in flight from their enemies. At sea they attempt to escape 

 by leaping, whole companies of them breaking the surface together as has often been 

 described. 



" Cornish (Contributions to Canadian Biology, 1902-1905 (1907), p. 83) states that large schools can often be seen at Canso 

 skipping over the watar as they flee from the pollock. 



" Blake (American Naturalist, Vol. IV, Nov., 1870, p. 521) remarked that while years before he saw thousands stranded at 

 Provincetown not one was seen in 1870. It failed in 1921, also, and no doubt in many intervening years. 



^2 For recent information on the local abundance of billfish on Cape Cod we are indebted to Capt. L. B. Goodspeed, a fisher- 

 man of long experience and close observation. 



" The flshes of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. I, 1880-188!. London. 



