albacore, the total number of fishing trips made each year, 

 and the average catch per fishing trip. The rather sharp 

 decline in landings in 1964 appeared to be caused by a 

 decrease in fishing effort, compounded by the effects of a 

 decreased average catch per fishing trip. 

 Cooperative Effort 



It is obvious that American and Japanese interests are 

 linked in both the North Pacific, where the fishing fleets 

 draw on a common resource, and in the South, where 

 mutually dependent commercial efforts are involved. Fishery 

 scientists of neither nation can speak with full authority 

 on albacore problems without access to all available infor- 

 mation on the Pacific, and much of it has not been published. 



Under these circumstances, the Laboratory in Honolulu 

 in 1964 entered into an informal agreement with the Nankai 

 Regional Fisheries Research Laboratory, where much of 

 the Japanese tuna research is conducted, to cooperate in 

 studies of the albacore. Tamio Otsu left Honolulu in Sep- 

 tember and spent the next 6 months at Kochi, Japan. Un- 

 published data from the North Pacific fishery, some going 

 back to the years before World War H, were made freely 

 available to him. In return, our Laboratory has provided 

 its Japanese sister laboratory data from its cruises, from 

 the eastern Pacific, and from Samoa. Although this project 

 was launched before the formal beginning of the Inter- 

 national Cooperation Year, it is fully in the spirit of that 

 enterprise. 



Otsu returned to Honolulu in March 196.5, bringing with 

 him transcriptions of the Japanese data to be coded, checked, 

 and key punched so that they can be analyzed by com- 

 puters. This work is scheduled to be finished by the 

 end of 1965. The wealth of information in the data should 

 l)rovide the basis of many new studies of the prized albacore. 



The Hidden Resource 



The central Pacific is fished by the Hawaiian fleet and 

 the Japanese. The Hawaiian fleet is rarely out of sight of 



land. It takes about 7,000 tons of tuna a year. The Japanesi> 

 fleet ignores the islands to reap a harvest overwhelmingly 

 larger than that taken by the Hawaiians. 



Several lines of evidence suggest that the Japanese fleet 

 is not exhausting the protein riches of the central Pacific: 

 there are still far less potentially harvestable fish caught 

 than uncaught. The most plentiful tuna larvae in the area 

 are tho.se of the skipjack tuna. Because the skipjack appar- 

 ently spawn no more frequently or plentifully than the other 

 tunas, the presence of these larvae point to the existence in 

 the central Pacific of an immense population essentially un- 

 touched by the Japanese longline fleet and only sampled by 

 the Hawaiian vessels. The bigeye and yellowfin tunas taken 

 on the Japanese longlines are large and old; somewhere in 

 the area there must be not only more of these fishes but 



a 



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30 



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20 



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V^, 



m 



1954 1955 1956 



1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 



FKU RF. 17. (mil 196.'<, ihr hi>lor< of lanHitig> al Annr- 

 iraii >ani<ia Ha^ i»n»' of ainiohl ^Irad* inrrt-a^f. T**i> fa<*tor* 

 am>uiil for lh<- sluriip in 1964: fener \f>><'I.. Hi-rt- ri..liiM^ 

 atul lh«' a^rragr oaN-h |»«-r trip H<Tr«'a..rd. 



23 



