FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 435 



than 15,000,000 fish, which considerably surpassed the catch of cod in weight and 

 far more in number of individual fish. 



No evidence whatever has yet been gathered as to the relation which the 

 annual catch of haddock bears to the total stock of fish in the Gulf, but judging 

 from European experience in the recapture of tagged cod we hazard the guess that 

 at this moment it supports not less than 150,000,000 haddock of marketable size 

 and man}^ times this number of smaller fish. 



Habits. — Probably the lower limit of depth is about the same for the haddock 

 as for the cod in the Gulf of Maine (p. 413), few being caught much below 100 

 fathoms,' but on the average haddock hve deeper than cod, very few being caught 

 in less than 5 to 10 fathoms and most of them in 25 to 60 fathoms. Haddock, large 

 or small, so seldom come into the very shoal waters along rocky shores and over 

 ledges where young cod are plentiful that the pound nets of Massachusetts reported 

 only about 5,000 pounds of haddock in 1919, as compared with almost 300,000 

 poimds of cod. Neither do we remember hearing of a haddock of any size in any 

 of the shoal harbors where little pollock so abound, a difference in habitat between 

 these closely related species holding from the time when the young fry first seek 

 bottom, for haddock usually do so in 20 to 50 fathoms or deeper, very rarely close 

 to the shore, and perhaps never in the httoral zone.* 



Haddock are even more distinctively ground fish than cod, and though, like 

 the latter, they pursue herring and other small fish, they so rarely rise far from 

 the bottom that we have never heard of a school coming to the surface or driving 

 their prey ashore on the beach, events by no means unusual with cod and a char- 

 acteristic phase in the hfe of the American pollock (p. 400). 



Haddock are less catholic than are cod in their choice of the type of bottom, 

 being hardly ever caught over ledges, rocks, kelp, etc., on the one hand, where cod 

 are so plentiful, or, on the other, on the soft oozy mud to which hake resort, but 

 chiefly on broken groimd, gravel, pebbles, clay, smooth hard sand, sticky sand of 

 gritty consistency, or where there are broken shells. They are especially partial 

 to the smooth areas between rocky patches. Haddock, unlike cod, never run up 

 estuaries into brackish water — much less into fresh water — but are typically offshore 

 fish, though they enter the bays and reaches between the islands along the coast of 

 Maine in some niunbers (p. 439). 



Haddock, like cod, diminish in numbers from the mouth toward the head of 

 the Bay of Fundy, and Canadian fishery statistics show that they are far more 

 plentiful on its Scotian shore than on its New Brunswick shore. 



Food. — During the first few months, while haddock fry are hving pelagic near 

 the surface, they probably depend on copepods as cod do, but so far as we are aware 

 no stomach contents of haddock as young as this have been examined. After they 

 take to the bottom they become bottom feeders hke cod, devouring all kinds of 

 invertebrates so indiscriminately that, as Baird (1889, p. 37) long ago remarked, 

 "a complete list of the animals devoured by the haddock would doubtless include 



* Goode and Bean (1896) list a haddock from 499 fathoms but with suspicion as to the accuracy of its label. 



< In this respect the fact that haddock fry less than 1 year old have never been reported in shoal water in the Gulf or at Woods 

 Hole corroborates European fishing experiments summarized by Damas (Rapports et Proces-Verbaux, Cons^il International 

 pour I'Kxploration de la Mer, Vol. X, 1909) and by Schmidt (Tbid.). 



