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FISHERY BULLETIN OF THE FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE 



last half of the eighteenth oentury, but these huge 

 fish may not have been weighed. And the general 

 run of the largest fish that are caught off the 

 American coast is only 10 to 15 pounds. But they 

 run larger off the African coast where 20-pounders 

 are not unusual and where one of 45 pounds 

 has been reported. 87 A 1-pound fish is about 

 14 inches long; a 2-pounder about 17 inches; a 

 3-pounder about 20 to 21 inches; a 4-pounder, 

 about 2 feet; and an 8-pounder about 28 to 29 

 inches long. Fish weighing from 10 to 12 pounds 

 are about 30 inches long. 88 



Habits. — The bluefish is oceanic in nature, found 

 indifferently inshore, offshore, and in many parts of 

 the ocean (p. 385). It usually travels in schools, 

 sometimes including many thousands ; in 1901, for 

 example, a school 4 or 5 miles long was reported 

 as seen in Narragansett Bay. And it is perhaps 

 the most ferocious and bloodthirsty fish in the sea, 

 leaving in its wake a trail of dead and mangled 

 mackerel, menhaden, herring, alewives, and other 

 species on which it preys. Goode 89 wrote long ago, 

 the bluefish, "not content with what they eat, 

 which is itself of enormous quantity, rush raven- 

 ously through the closely crowded schools, cutting 

 and tearing the living fish as they go, and leaving 

 in their wake the mangled fragments." It is not 

 only the schooling fish that fall prey to them, but 

 scup, squeteague, hake, butterfish, cunners, and 

 small fish of all kinds, besides squid. Baird 

 writing in the 1870's, when bluefish were at the 

 height of their abundance, estimated that they 

 annually destroyed at least twelve hundred million 

 millions of fish during the four summer months off 

 southern New England; and while this calculation 

 surely was wildly exaggerated it will help give 

 the reader a graphic realization of the havoc that 

 they wreak during their periods of plenty. They 

 are also known to eat various Crustacea and even 

 marine worms on occasion. And the young 

 "snappers," 6 to 8 inches long, feed largely on 

 copepods, or crustacean and on molluskan larvae, 

 as well as on fish fry smaller than themselves. 



Bluefish are creatures of warm water, never 

 found in any numbers in temperatures lower than 

 about 58° to 60° (at least in summer); and they 

 appear along the United States coast as warm- 



87 By Lt. Commander Henry Lyman (Bluefishing, 1950, p. 9) who also saw 

 a 22-pounder weighed off northwest Africa, with still larger ones that were not 

 weighed. 



» Goode, Fish. Ind. U. S., Sect. 1, 1884, p. 442. 



88 Fish. Ind. U. 8., Sect. 1, 1884, p. 544. 



season migrants only. "Bluefish," writes Ly- 

 man, 90 "appear off the southern coast of Florida in 

 midwinter," and by "late March anglers take 

 them off the Florida coast in good quantities." 

 "Large schools pass the Carolinas during March 

 and April, appear off Delaware during April, and 

 are first taken off New Jersey and Long Island, 

 N. Y., during April and May," by commercial 

 fishermen working well offshore. The earliest 

 commercial catches are reported off southern 

 Massachusetts in late May. But it is not until 

 about a month later that they work inshore in 

 numbers. 



When they do come inshore, midtitudes of little 

 ones, known as snappers, run up into harbors and 

 estuaries all along the coast, from Delaware Bay 

 to Cape Cod. The larger ones, arriving some- 

 what later, also often come close enough in to the 

 beach, west and south of Cape Cod, for many to be 

 caught by anglers casting in the surf. But it is 

 only in good years that this last holds true in our 

 Gulf, even in the southern part. 91 When they "first 

 appear offshore, in any locality, almost always they 

 will be feeding deep, at or near the bottom. This 

 means that surface lines and baits are practically 

 worthless." 92 Later in the season schools are often 

 seen at the surface, harrying other fish; and if they 

 are deep, they can often be lured to the surface by 

 throwing out ground bait. 



Except for an occasional belated fish (p. 388) , the 

 bluefish disappear wholly from the entire coast 

 northward from the Carolinas by early November. 

 The winter home of this northern contingent has 

 long been the subject of speculation. But the 

 fact that we saw one trawled in 55 fathoms off 

 Marthas Vineyard in mid-January in 1950 by the 

 Eugene H, and that several hauls of 175 to 1,400 

 pounds per trip were brought in from the region of 

 the Hudson Gorge by otter trawlers early that 

 same February, makes it probable that most of the 

 members of the northern contingent merely move 

 offshore on bottom, to the warm zone along the 

 outer edge of the continent, to pass the winter 

 there. It is certain, however, that some migrate 

 far southward (as has often been suggested for the 

 stock as a whole) for one that was tagged off New 

 York in August 1936 was recaptured off Matanzas, 



" Blueflshing, 1950, pp. 10, 11. 



81 We refer the reader to Lt. Comdr. Lyman's recent book (Bluefishing, 

 1950, pp. 34-19) for an interesting survey of the more-productive blueflshing 

 grounds, Gulf of Mexico arid Florida to Cape Cod. 



•» Quoted from Lyman, Bluefishing, 1950, p. 11. 



