Proceedings Forty-seventh Annual Meeting 57 



Thursday Morning Session, August 30th. 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 

 BY DR. GEORGE W. FIELD. 



It has been my good fortune to spend the past three months 

 in Colorado, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming, and I have been 

 impressed with the importance of the development of fisheries 

 work in that section of the country. Everywhere, all over the 

 country, the importance of fisheries as a national problem is 

 increasing very rapidly. The general utilization of fish as food, 

 fertilizer and oil is at present handicapped, among other things, 

 by a lack of individual responsibility, by divided or even entire 

 absence of legal authority, by selfishness on the part of individuals 

 and by lack of knowledge and foresight. This results in enormous 

 wastage in all directions. 



Have you considered how many fish are thoughtlessly killed 

 by anglers (not sportsmen) who catch a large number of fish and 

 fail to utilize them? The aggregate is astounding. It is a small 

 matter for a party to go out and catch a dozen, thirty, fifty or 

 more fish of various kinds which are edible, but how many of 

 these are left unused and forgotten in the boats or otherwise 

 wasted? On both the west and east coasts and to a certain extent 

 in the rivers, a very large number of fish below the market size are 

 caught and killed. This particularly occurs on the New England 

 coast where the fishermen still make a business of catching small 

 mackerel, pollock and other smaller fish, counting about 900 to 

 the barrel. They get on the market forty cents to a dollar for 

 those 900 fish. If these were allowed to grow to maturity they 

 could get from twenty-five to thirty-five or forty cents apiece for 

 them. We have made some rough computations and found that 

 forty cents worth of such small fish, in one year, possibly, or in two 

 at the outside, might amount to $280.00 worth of food by natural 

 growth, after allowing for a decrease of 50% in numbers. But 

 more than that, under this unwise method of catching schools of 

 small fish by traps and seines, a very large proportion of these 

 are thrown overboard as of no market value. 



Reforms of this kind which affect the pocketbooks of fishermen 

 are difficult to bring about, but they are exceedingly important in 



