A NEW APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF MARINE RESOURCES 



-THE CALIFORNIA COOPERATIVE OCEANIC 



FISHERIES INVESTIGATIONS 



By Robert C. Miller 



California Academy of Sciences 

 San Francisco, California, U.S.A. 



The importance of integrating oceanographic and fisheries re- 

 search is too obvious to require restatement. Such integration has been 

 achieved in specific areas, especially in the North Sea and perhaps rather 

 generally in the North Atlantic. In the Pacific Ocean, which occupies 

 well over one-third of the globe and is so vast that even its preliminary 

 exploration has not been completed, such integration has rarely been 

 achieved. To this statement there are a few notable exceptions, among 

 them the Philippine Fishery Program and the POFI operations base 

 on Hawaii. 



When the California sardine fishery, which used to be one of the 

 great fisheries of the world, began a sudden and disastrous decline from 

 an approximate six hundred thousand tons a year to a point where the 

 fishery is practically non-existent, fisheries biologists discovered that they 

 had no backlog of oceanographic information to explain this pheno- 

 menal decline, nor to predict the future of the fishery. 



In 1947 the State of California embarked on a remarkable experi- 

 ment in scientific research. Legislation was adopted establishing a 

 Marine Research Committee of nine members, representing the Fish 

 and Game Commission, the fishing industry, and the public. Under 

 the sponsorship of this Committee five agencies have been asked to co- 

 operate in solving the sardine problem— the California Academy of 

 Sciences, the California Department of Fish and Game, the Hopkins 

 Marine Station of Stanford University, the Scripps Institution of 

 Oceanography of the University of California, and the U.S. Fish and 

 Wildlife Service. The research program is laid out and coordinated by 

 a Technical Advisory Committee made up of representatives of these 

 operating agencies. 



It is significant that the legislation under which the Marine Re- 

 search Committee was established was sponsored by the fishing industry 

 itself, and that the industry requested the Legislature to increase the 

 landing tax on sardines by an amount of fifty cents a ton, the revenue 

 from this tax to be used specifically for research on the sardine. Sub- 



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