Shortly after the discovery of human blood types at the 

 turn of the century, Japanese scientists began to seek 

 similar factors in fishes. These investigations were not 

 aggressively pursued on an international scale, however, 

 until the 1950's, when several U. S. investigators, including 

 Lucian M. Sprague, now with the BCF Laboratory in Hono- 

 lulu, took up this line of research. 



Like men, like cattle, like most other creatures relatively 

 high on the evolutionary scale, fishes of the same species 

 may have different types of blood; this fact has given sub- 

 population research a new dimension. Here is a "tag" that 

 is built in, that is inherited and unalterable. 



Within the past decade, an entirely new and e.xtremely 

 active area of research has opened up, and the geneticist 

 has entered the ranks of the marine professions. Recogniz- 

 ing the importance of the early findings, our Laboratory 

 entered the field in 1960 and since then has become a world 

 center for research on the blood groups of tunas (fig. 10). 

 Its accomplishments have been described in several scientific 

 papers and note«t in previous progress reports. They are. 

 briefly, (1) use of a number of systems, but mainly one 

 called the B system, discovered by Sprague, in studies that 

 showed that the Hawaiian fishery drew not on a single 

 population of skipjack, but several; (2) determination, 

 again largely by use of the B system, that as many as seven 

 subpopulations of skipjack may exist in the central Pacific 

 from Hawaii to Tahiti; (3) discovery of an A-B-0 system 

 in the bigeye tuna, a system named after that most familiar 

 in humans and resembling it in that it is determined by the 

 inheritance pattern of three related allelic genes; and (4) 

 the finding of blood group systems in the yellowfin and 

 bluefin tunas. 



h'Hwl UK 10. AfitT thvy hH\e b^'^n Ivpt-d, !4«>nie blood , 

 !-uiiipb'^ Hrt- frozen in a ((Urfriii solution f*»r lalrr ust* in 

 >liinHiir(li/-ing rfa|E<*i'l^. H«'r<' u U-chnician ^>rin|[*"> blood 

 into solution ihat will b#- fr«»/*-ii. 



12 



