REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 



lar about the weatber. I therefore went out ausious to see the result 

 of my new method of fishing. I soon noticed that there must be fish on 

 the hooks, but I was not prepared for as hirge a haul as it turned out to 

 be. On nearly every other hook there was a young codfish, and when the 

 end of the line had come up, I was almost surrounded by fish. They were 

 all considerably larger than those I had formerly observed in this place, 

 their average length being about one foot. In the beginning I thought 

 that these must be two-year-old fish, but when I afterward set my line 

 in a shallower place I also caught smaller fish, so that I soon had all 

 the different grades of size. The " going out" of the young codfish to 

 the algse bottoms had probably begun much sooner than I had expected, 

 and some of the older fish had, perhaps, already gone out while I was 

 still pursuing mj^ investigations in the shallow places along the shore. 



That these fish, which later in spring are well known to the fishermen 

 by the name of " algiB-fish," are really young codfish, and not, as the 

 fishermen generally believe, a separate species of torsk, which lives all 

 the time on the algse bottoms, has been placed beyond a doubt by my 

 former investigations. These fish were, both as regards color and shape, 

 so exactly like the full-grown codfish, that by placing them side by side 

 there could not be the least doubt that they were the same fish at dif- 

 ferent stages of their development. Some of them, which chiefly seemed 

 to live among the alga?, differed at first sight somewhat from the others 

 by their plump shape and their brown and even red color, and by a 

 larger number of the characteristic dark spots. But there was no doubt 

 in my mind that these differences were only caused by their having 

 chosen locations which yielded more and better food, and that, nuder 

 less favorable circumstances, they would in a comparatively short time 

 again assume their usual color and shape ; for I found fish in every im- 

 aginable intermediate stage, and as regards the younger fish, former 

 observ^ations had proved this conclusively. 



Occasion.'illy I also caught a considerably larger fish, not much smaller 

 than the small winter-codfish, only that the organs of generation were 

 not yet fully developed. All these larger cod I considered to be strag- 

 glers from the generation immediately preceding this one, therofore 

 two-year-old fish. The chief mass of the small codfish living on the 

 algte bottoms during spring and summer belong, in my opinion, to one 

 and the same generation, and the very considerable diflereuce in size is 

 easily explained by the circumstance that they are hatched at diflerent 

 times (the spawning-season of the codfish lasts from the middle of Feb- 

 ruary till some time in May), by the difference in the quantity and qual- 

 ity of their food, and likewise by purely individual causes. 



Having now again found the young codfish in a new phase of their 

 development, and having thus found the thread of my investigations, 

 which I had almost considered as lost, the next thing for me to do was 

 to corroborate more fully the results of my observations, and to get some 

 idea regarding the occurrence of the small codfish in the different local- 



