1137 
and the increased use of refrigeration after World War I, led to a rapid increase 
in the landing of haddock as its sales became more nation wide. They reached 
a top level of 294 million pounds in 1929. This appeared to be somewhat more 
fishing pressure than the stocks would stand and landings, but not market, fell 
off rather steadily during the following fifteen years, to level off at about 150 
million pounds per year. 
Haddock did not suffer from the influx of frozen fillets and blocks that began 
after the end of Worid War II as did the cod fishery. Haddock, while found 
commercially to eastward, has its center of abundance on George’s Bank off New 
England. This is not quite as easy for the Canadians to get at as for the New 
Englanders. Haddock had the market for fresh fish in the New England and 
Middle Atlantic area which stayed more or less steady. Consequently haddock 
became the income mainstay of the otherwise distressed (except for scallop) 
New England ground fish fishery and catches have vacillated in a fairly narrow 
range of 130 to 160 million pounds per year for the past twenty years, the vacil- 
lations being as much a matter of varying strength of year classes entering the 
fishery as anything else until the last few years, when a new factor entered. 
Beginning in the early 1960’s the Russians began to fish very heavily on Georges 
Bank and the Canadians to fish more heavily there. There has been definite and 
heavy over fishing in the last few years. This has been accompanied by poor 
incoming year classes for the past four years, possibly connected with the over- 
fishing. The machinery of the International Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Com- 
mission has not yet been able to dea! with this overfishing problem effectively. 
Consequently the population is in poor condition and the economics of the New 
England fishery are bad. The New England catch in 1967 was only 98.5 million 
pounds. 
(7) Pacific Mackerel.—The Pacific mackerel has been fished commercially in 
Southern California since the turn of the century. It has been subject to rather 
wide fluctuations in abundance associated with changes in ocean climate and 
their affect on the size of year classes entering the fishery, not unlike the Atlantic 
mackerel. The fishery reached a peak of production in 1935 when 146 million 
pounds were landed. There were two years since that (1936 and 1941) when 
landings equalled or exceeded that level. Otherwise there has been a rather steady 
decline in production in spite of a decrease in total amount of fishing effort avail- 
able in the area. In the last three years, in particular, the decline has been 
sharp, and in 1967 only 2 million pounds were taken. 
The decline appears rather clearly to be of a biological nature and related to 
a fishing pressure possibly too great for the existing stock to sustain. It is not 
clear, however, that competition at young stages from the enormously increased 
anchovy population has not been a factor of critical importance. For the same 
reason as noted above under Pacific sardine nothing is being done about this. 
In the State of California the regulation of marine fisheries is split between 
the legislature and the Fish and Game Commission, with the result that there 
is no mechanism available for managing the fishery in accordance with the 
scientific evidence and well known modern management procedures. The Fed- 
eral Government has no managerial responsibilities in the area, chiefly because it 
has not asserted it. Almost all mackerel fishing is done outside the 3-mile limit 
of State waters. 
(8) Jack Mackerel.—The situation of Jack Mackerel in California is quite 
different than that of Pacific mackerel in the same area. The stock is known 
to be quite large in relation to the fishery and to be underutilized. Nevertheless 
the eatch has shrunk from a peak landing of 146 million pounds in 1952 to land- 
ings of 41 million pounds in 1966. 
The reasons for the decline are economic and they are several. The main one 
is the decay of the Pacific sardine fishery and the gradual disappearance of the 
large fleet of local purse seiners that lived on it. This fleet formerly caught jack 
mackerel as a side-line seasonally, and as a side line they could afford to catch 
it rather cheaply. With the decline of the sardine resource these vessels required 
to live more and more on their jack mackerel catches. Because of this they re- 
quired a higher price for their mackerel catches. At the same time that this rise 
in price of raw material for canning was going up the market for cheap canned 
fish in the United States was decreasing. The consequence of the two movements 
in opposite directions were that jack mackerel have just been priced out of the 
only market they have except for fish meal and present raw fish prices are far 
too high for that. An economic factor of perhaps even greater importance is that 
there is wide variation in availability of jack mackerel to the remaining fishing 
