74 American Fisheries Society 



2. Protection of the fish on the beds, and during their migra- 

 tions thereto. 



3. Protection of the young fish from wholesale slaughter 

 during infancy. 



4. Protection of the food supply of commercially valuable 

 food fishes. 



In this very brief discussion of the problems of the country's 

 commercial fisheries, the writer, from the limitations of his exper- 

 ience, necessarily approaches the subject from the viewpoint of 

 the Atlantic seaboard states, and must confine himself to sug- 

 gestions relating to those migratory fishes which would become 

 the wards of the nation in the event of the passage of a migratory 

 fish law comparable to the existing migratory bird law. Inland 

 and deep sea fisheries, save in the matter of general principles, 

 are not here considered. But even within such restricted lines 

 there is enormous need of enlightenment among the public and 

 the public's official servants on the broad principles of conserva- 

 tion; upon the far-reaching effects of present day wastage and 

 upon the ways and means of preventing it. 



It is probable that out of every hundred persons who have read 

 at one time and another detailed, convincing statements of the 

 injury done to fishes by the pollution of rivers, ninety-nine have 

 jumped to the conclusion that the problem is a local one, both as 

 to effect and remedy. And that those who have heard of the 

 destructive effects of overfishing almost never think of those 

 effects as bearing upon localities distant from the immediate 

 scene of the wastage. Yet the poisoning of the waters of the 

 Connecticut and Housatonic rivers in the writer's state have no 

 more direct bearing on the shad supply of Connecticut than 

 upon that of New Jersey or Maryland. It affects the entire 

 matter of shad propagation on the Atlantic coast. It is an affair 

 of interstate concern. 



Perhaps the best possible illustration of the idea of far flung 

 consequences of local conditions is furnished by the unspeakable 

 practices with relation to striped bass that exist in the Roanoke 

 river, North Carolina, where the bass are ruthlessly slaughtered 

 by the thousands while on their way to the spawning beds. It is 

 claimed, and certainly with considerable if not absolute truth, 

 that the Roanoke river is the natural spawning place of by far 



