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FISHERY BULLETIN OF THE FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE 



Bank. But this would give a wholly false pic- 

 ture of the actual situation, because most of the 

 red hake that are caught on these grounds are 

 thrown overboard because they are too small to 

 be worth gutting and icing under present market 

 conditions. 



ActuaUy, we trawled 34 squirrel hake and only 

 two other hake 37 in Ipswich Bay, in 22 fathoms on 

 one occasion in July 1912; Welsh counted 5,450 

 squirrel hake to 652 white hake caught in otter 

 trawling on the northwest slope of Georges Bank 

 in June 1912; we counted 2,457 red hake to only 

 196 white hake from 29 trawl hauls at 22 to 150 

 fathoms on the southwestern part of Georges 

 Bank and south of Nantucket Shoals on the 

 Albatross III, May 11-18, 1950; and we saw 

 2,040 squirrel hake taken in 42 hauls by the 

 Eugene H on the southwest part of Georges Bank, 

 in late June 1951, but only 51 white hake. Re- 

 ported landings also, in pounds, for 1945, were 

 about 100 times as great for red as for white hake 

 from the Nantucket grounds, whence all the 

 little hake are brought in for the trash fish industry. 

 And the discrepancy is greater still in numbers, 

 for the white hake are much the heavier of the 

 two, individually. Red hake also predominate 

 over white among the hake landed in New York 

 and to the southward, as is illustrated by the 

 catch statistics for 1947. 38 



Landings, for 1947, to nearest 100,000 pounds: 



New York New Jersey Delaware 



Red hake 1,200,000 5,600,000 200,000 



White hake 1,000,000 200,000 100 



On the other hand, inquiries of fishermen, 

 corroborated by our own experience, point to the 

 white hake as the more plentiful of the two in the 

 basin of our Gulf at depths greater than 40 to 50 

 fathoms. The Atlantis, for example, trawled 

 about 700 white hake in the deep basins off Cape 

 Cod, west of Jeffreys Ledge and off Mount 

 Desert, in August 1936, but only a scattering of 

 squirrel hake. This appears to apply equally to 

 the deeper holes in Massachusetts Bay at depths 

 greater than 30 fathoms or so (both Storer and 

 Goode and Bean spoke of the "white" as the more 

 common of the two there), also to the Bay of 



17 The tatter were listed by Welsh as V. regiut, but probably they were 

 white hake. 



* About 13,000 pounds of white hake were reported from Maryland in 1947, 

 about 65,000 pounds from Virginia, and about 4,000 pounds from North 

 Carolina, with no reds. But we suspect that reds were actually included as 

 well as whites, and spotted hake also. 



Fundy region in general, including Passama- 

 quoddy Bay, according to Huntsman. And 

 nearly all of the hakes that have been listed by 

 name from the more easterly of the Nova Scotian 

 Banks, or from the southern part of the Grand 

 Banks in the annual reports of the Newfoundland 

 Department of Natural Resources, have been the 

 white (tenuis). Tenuis, also, is the only member 

 of the pair that was reported by Cornish 39 from 

 Canso, but chuss alone is recorded from the Cape 

 Breton shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence by Cox, 40 

 who also records one from 205 fathoms on the 

 Nova Scotian side of Cabot Strait. 



The situation is made more confusing by Corn- 

 ish's report of hake with 123 rows of scales from 

 Prince Edward Island, and with 130 rows of 

 scales from Canso, fish intermediate, that is, be- 

 tween chuss and tenuis in this regard, though 

 favoring the latter. Perhaps the separation 

 between the two species in number of scales, and 

 also in other features, may not be so sharp toward 

 the northern boundaries of their geographic ranges 

 as we have found it farther south. 



A more or less regular inshore movement of 

 hakes of one or the other species, or of both of 

 them, is said to take place in autumn, especially in 

 the northeastern part of the Gulf, made evident by 

 capture of considerable numbers in winter in the 

 deeper, muddy harbors and bays east of Penobscot 

 Bay, including St. John Harbor, and Kennebecasis 

 Bay, which they reach by running up the St. John 

 River, and where they are caught all winter 

 through the ice. They also cai - ry out correspond- 

 ing movements in and offshore off southern New 

 England, with goodly numbers appearing in 

 shoal water at Woods Hole in autumn. But it is 

 only in the spring and autumn that they are found 

 close inshore off New York and off New Jersey. 

 On the other hand, they are said to enter Passama- 

 quoddy Bay in early summer, to withdraw in 

 autumn. 



Probably the explanation is that the adults, 

 being cool water fish, are barred from the shallows 

 in summer by high temperature along the coasts of 

 Massachusetts and of west-central Maine, but 

 that the low summer temperature of Passama- 

 quoddy Bay allows large hake to summer there, as 

 well as small. Their reported withdrawal from 



"' Contrib. Canadian Biol. (1902-1905), 1907. p. 89. 

 « Contrib. Canadian Biol. (1918-1920), 1921, p. 113. 



