548 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES. 
commercial potentiality both as an individual and as a parent, and in both 
respects its utility is vastly curtailed by premature destruction. 
Legal measures for the prohibition of especially destructive methods, and 
the regulation of abuses connected with the more legitimate means of taking 
sponges, would undoubtedly, if properly enforced, do much to make more 
remote the depletion of the beds. But aside from the difficulties encountered 
in enforcing such legislation, as is witnessed in the failure of the considerable 
navies maintained by some of the states to enforce the oyster laws, such regu- 
lation could but retard the approach and not prevent the arrival of the day 
when the product of the natural beds will be inadequate to the demands of 
the markets. Even a legitimate fishery prosecuted under the spur of an increas- 
ing demand is eventually able to exterminate for all practical commercial pur- 
poses any sedentary organism toward which it may be directed. 
When the demand is light and prices consequently low, as they were for 
many years after the discovery of the Florida beds, the more populous grounds 
only may be worked with profit. When the sponges become so few and scattered 
that the time spent in looking for them greatly exceeds that expended in actually 
taking them from the bottom, profits are reduced to a degree when a closed 
season is automatically established by the removal of the spongers to other and 
denser grounds, and an opportunity is given for the replenishment of the beds 
by natural means. As the demand increases and the product becomes more 
valuable, more persons are attracted to the fishery, the methods become more 
efficient, and the degree of depletion of the beds, serving as a deterrent to further 
operations, more nearly approaches the limit of actual extinction. The beds 
are scoured year after year for the few remaining sponges, the decreasing supply 
and the increasing demand operating together to make profitable a closeness of 
search before unthought of and giving a value to small and otherwise undesirable 
sponges which in the earlier days of the fishery would have been allowed to lie 
unmolested on the bottom for want of amarket. The consequence of this is that 
when a ground is finally even partially abandoned as a profitable fishery so few 
sponges are left, and these are so small in average size, that the reproductive 
capacity of the area is most seriously reduced and a long time must elapse before 
the bottom can be reseeded by nature’s unaided operations. 
Some assistance could be rendered by the establishment of closed seasons, 
not so much those which prohibit fishing for a more or less restricted period each 
year, but such as would deny the right to fish on given depleted areas for terms 
of sufficient duration to permit the remaining young sponges to grow to reason- 
able marketable size and become of greater potential value in reseeding the area 
with a fresh crop of young. If such regulation could be rigorously and intelli- 
gently enforced, and if it were supplemented by measures preventing the taking 
