^02 U. S. BUREAU OF FISHERIES 



INTRODUCTION 



Conserving our natural resources is no new concept of the t\yen- 

 tieth century; it was a matter of concern in this country a hundred 

 or more years ago. Today practically all people are agreed that it 

 is a matter of common and vital necessity to the welfare of the 



country. 



But while there is no longer a need for defending conservation, or 

 even for justifying the existence of agencies for its wise application, 

 there is constant need for re-defining it ; for "conservation" is one of 

 those flexible words that has been bent into many different meanings 

 to suit many diiferent purposes. The phrase, "conservation of fish- 

 eries", for example, has whatever connotation a person wishes to give 



to it. . . ,. J. p 



To many people, perhaps even to most, it implies some form ot 

 iH'ohibition. To some it means prohibiting all people from fishing, 

 so that all fish mav live their lives in the ocean and m the streams 

 forever unmolested ; to others, it means prohibiting only other people 

 from fishing, so that they themselves can enjoy exclusive right to 

 pursue their piscatorial pleasures without competition. 



In the face of such confusion, then, what does the Bureau of Fish- 

 eries mean by conservation? It means precisely what a business 

 oroanization does when it refers to a conservative financial policy. 

 Iirother words, it is the practice of getting for the most people the 

 oreatest value from resources without impairing the capital— living 

 off the income without cutting into the principal. 



It is o-enerally agreed that a business organization can neither for- 

 mulate a conservative fiscal plan without a considerable background 

 knowled^re of business principles, nor can it maintain a continuous 

 conservative policy without a constant study of current business 

 conditions Hence the need for economists, market specialists, ac^ 

 countants, etc. In the same way it is impossible for the Bureau of 

 Fisheries to formulate a conservative plan for administering the 

 fisheries without a background knowledge of biological principles, 

 and imi)ossible to carry out such a policy without a continuous cur- 

 rent study of conditions aifecting the fish. Hence the ne^d for a 

 permanent staif of aquatic biologists. The Division of Scientific 

 Inquiry of the Bureau of Fisheries carries on such a continuous 

 proo-ram: and this report sets forth briefly the results obtained dur- 

 incr'^ieSS. It must be clear from the following pages that the sev- 

 eral researches here recounted are not short, completed studies, but 

 long-term ones, for which this report re]n-esents but a small segment. 

 One of the most significant facts which is becoming ever more ap- 

 parent is that the service which the Division of Scientific Inquiry 

 offers cannot nearly meet the demand, for the service is consider- 

 ably limited by the funds at hand. An investigation on a single 

 fishery is seldom a one-man project, particularly when the sj^ecies 

 studied is widely distributed, when data must be gathered simul- 

 taneously from widely separated regions. In fact it is usually in- 

 advisable even to attempt a serious one-man investigation on a large 

 and imi>ortant fishery. Consequently many species must remain un- 

 attended until resources are available to undertake proper studies on 

 them. Even the current investigations ha\e all been considerably 



