THE BASSES: FRES H-W ATER AND MARINE 



Common Names 



Schoepf, in 1787, recorded the New York name 

 as blackfish. Mitchill (1814) writes of it as sea 

 basse, black harry, hanna hills, and bluefish. De 

 Kay (1842) has it as the black sea-bass, black bass, 

 and blackfish. Dr. Storer mentions the Massachu- 

 setts name of black perch. In the Middle States 

 a name for the fish is black will, and at New Bed- 

 ford one may hear it called rock-bass. The best- 

 known names are sea-bass and blackfish. 



Distribution 



There are three distinct forms of sea-bass, the 

 northern, the southern, and a third in the Gulf of 

 Mexico. The northern form is found from Vine- 

 yard Sound to Cape Hatteras, occasionally stray- 

 ing north of Cape Cod to Massachusetts Bay. At 

 Wood's Hole, Mass., the fish was very common in 

 1898, when it arrived in May and left the inshore 

 waters about October 1, having been most abun- 

 dant from July to September. In 1900 a remark- 

 able scarcity of this bass was reported at Wood's 

 Hole, and observers of the United States Fish 

 Commission stated that it was rapidly decreasing 

 in numbers. Hand-line fishing, even on the spawn- 

 ing-grounds off Hyannis, was very poor, and 



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