THE LONGLINE RESOURCE 



The tuna populations of the various parts of the Pacific 

 Ocean may or may not be interrelated biologically, but 

 economically the fisheries most certainly are. A substan- 

 tial portion of the American demand for tuna has for years 

 been supplied by Japanese vessels operating in the Pacific, 

 Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. Several studies, some of them 

 by the Laboratory in Honolulu, suggest that the longline 

 fleet is finding the tunas of the Pacific less plentiful than 

 in the past. 



What is happening to the fishery for the tunas is exem- 

 plified in an American possession, American Samoa. The 

 principal element in the private economy of American 

 Samoa is the fish business (fig. 17). The two canneries 

 there, which are American-owned, provide jobs for about 

 1,130 American Samoans (of a total population of about 

 20,000 persons, over half of whom are children), and have 



payrolls estimated in 1964 by a French observer, F. 

 Doumenge, at $2 million (in 1968 the figure would be 

 higher). The canneries depend for their supply upon 

 foreign vessels that fish almost across the breadth of thf 

 South Pacific Ocean (fig. 18). About 70 percent of the 

 catch consists of albacore. 



The Laboratory in Honolulu has carefully watched the 

 fishery from its inception in 1954 and since 196.3 has main- 

 tained a field station in Pago Pago. Analyses of the catch 

 by biologist Tamio Otsu and his associates are beginning 

 to suggest that the vessels will continue to find the albacore 

 loss profitable to catch. A declining albacore fishery would 

 be a serious threat to the island's economy. The Labora- 

 tory is continuing its studies and is preparing detailed 

 scientific analvses of the catches. 



THE OCEANIC ENVIRONMENT 



Oceanographic studies at the Laboratory in Honolulu 

 are designed to provide environmental information in the 

 areas of interest affecting the distribution of tunas. This 



FIGURE 16. Large shrimp okin to those that provide the bulk of the 

 fishery elsewhere in the world were located on the ocean floor off 

 Hawaii. Although they run as large os eight to the pound (heods on) 

 . — shrimp of good commercial size — it appears that the resource is 

 limited and can support no more than a small, local, specialty morket. 



is being done through (1) Pacificwide studies of the ver- 

 tical and horizontal distribution of water properties, water 

 masses, and field of motion through the analysis of a 

 historic stockpile of oceanographic .station data, (2) .studies 

 of the oceanographic climate in the trade wind zone of the 

 North Pacific, and {?•) studies of island wake systems. The 

 Pacificwide .studies form the basis of an "Oceanographic 

 atlas of the Pacific Ocean," by Richard A. Barkley, pub- 

 lished In- the University of Hawaii Press late in 1968. The 

 other two investigations will be discussed below. 



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