phenomenon in most coastal areas, and arises from the 

 practice prevalent in the commercial fisheries, es- 

 pecially at smaller, less well-organized points of landing, 

 to pay off in cash and keep no accurate records of the 

 transaction. 



No satisfactory historical record of marine sport fish 

 catches exists for the area. Biologists of the two states 

 have made various partial studies of saltwater sport 

 fishing and these are useful in providing intuitive es- 

 timates of the saltwater sport fisheries of the area as a 

 whole. The national surveys of 1960, 1965, and 1970, con- 

 ducted by the Bureau of the Census (Clark [1962]; Deuel 

 and Clark 1968; Deuel 1973) included New Jersey and 

 New York, but the estimates were for larger areas and 

 catches for individual states were not reported. New Jer- 

 sey is included in the estimate for the middle Atlantic 

 area. New Jersey to Cape Hatteras inclusive. New York 

 is included with the New England coastal states. Further 

 subdivision would not provide useful estimates state by 

 state because the national sample was too small (David 

 G. Deuel, pers. commun.). Mohr* recently made es- 

 timates of recreational finfish catches in New York 

 waters from available data and McHugh (in press a) 

 made rough estimates of recreational shellfish catches. 



Foreign catches in the sector of New York Bight 

 beyond 12 miles have been reported by ICNAF since 

 1966, when a new statistical subarea was established by 

 that body, subarea 6, extending from Block Island Sound 

 to Cape Hatteras. This subarea is further subdivided, 

 and division 6A includes essentially the New York Bight 

 area as it has been defined for MESA purposes (Fig. 1). 



These statistics — domestic commercial and 

 recreational, and foreign — have been collected from 

 various sources and have been published in a compen- 

 dium of available information (McHugh and Williams 

 1976). That publication contains an extensive 

 bibliography, and the references are not repeated here. 



Some species discussed in the present paper were not 

 included in the New York study (McHugh 1972a).^ To 

 bring the two studies into agreement as a treatment of 

 the fisheries of New York Bight as a whole, additional in- 

 formation on the marine fisheries of New York State has 

 been included where appropriate. 



TOTAL LANDINGS IN NEW JERSEY 



As in New York, commercial marine landings in New 

 Jersey have been dominated most of the time by indus- 

 trial fisheries, especially for menhaden. Therefore, the 

 history of total landings in New Jersey is largely a his- 

 tory of the menhaden fishery (Fig. 3). To analyze the 

 record thoroughly, landings must be examined by 



'Mohr. Peter Thomas. 1976. Marine Sport fisheries of New York 

 State. A thesi.s presented in partial fulfilhnent of the requirements for 

 the degree of Master of Science in Marine Knvironmental Sciences, State 

 University of New Yorit at Stony Brook. 



■•An error in the introduction to that paper should be noted. On page 

 .586 it was stated that surf clam landings dominate the New York catch. 

 This is true for New York and New .Jersey combined, but the dominant 

 species in New York landings is hard clam. 



Figure 3.— Total annual commercial landings of fishes and shellfishes 

 in New Jersey 1880-1975. The lower line shows menhaden landings. 

 In this, as in other figures, broken lines have been used to connect 

 years between which one or more years data are missing. 



species. It is useful to examine total landings, but to do 

 this intelligently the d^ta must be divided into two sub- 

 sets, industrial fisheries and food fisheries (Fig. 4, 5). 

 Trends in the food fisheries are easier to understand if 

 finfisheries and shellfisheries are separated (Fig. 5). 



The food shellfisheries as a whole show two principal 

 periods of development. The early period, ending about 

 1953, was dominated by the oyster industry {Crassostrea 

 L'irginica), although the trend in oyster production has 

 been downward since the 19th century. The sharp rise in 

 total shellfish production that began in the late 1950s 

 came about mainly through the phenomenal develop- 



HORSESHOE CRAB 



Yv 



\ 



.. V--S, 



90 1900 



Figure 4. — Annual commercial landings of industrial fishes and ahell- 

 flshes in New Jersey 1880-1975. 



