FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 



229 



Passamaquoddy Bay in autumn may be in avoid- 

 ance of extreme winter chilling. But we should 

 remind the reader that failure to catch fish on hook 

 and line in the cold season of the year (it is in this 

 way that hakes are caught in the Passamaquoddy 

 region) does not necessarily mean that they have 

 departed. The hake may have stopped biting, 

 as every fisherman knows by experience. The 

 evidence of otter trawl catches is much more 

 reliable in this respect, for ground fishes in general. 

 Except for in and offshore movements, hake are 

 resident throughout the year in the open Gulf of 

 Maine wherever they are found, once they have 

 taken to the bottom. And they appear to be 



much more stationary than either cod or haddock. 



The localities where we have found eggs, pro- 

 visionally identified as squirrel hake (fig. 109), 

 show that it spawns all around the Gulf from Cape 

 Cod to Nova Scotia. And despite its rather deep- 

 water habitat and preference for soft bottom, 

 most of these egg stations have been in shoal 

 water near the coast; a haul in the eastern basin 

 which yielded both squirrel hake and silver hake 

 eggs (p. 1 78) has been the only exception. This, of 

 course, points to a movement from the basins into 

 shoaler water for spawning. 



It seems that the white hake spawns from late 

 winter through spring to late summer, for we saw a 



Figure 109. — Locality records for squirrel hake eggs (•), and for larvae of rockling (A) in the Gulf of Maine. 



