1145 
however, will accomplish miracles, and this fishery was sufficiently lucrative 
to attract good skippers. Now that the fishery is becoming mature good vessels 
newly constructed to its needs are coming off the ways and joining the fleet. In 
the interim a good many vessels and lives were lost, and a good deal of money 
was made. A major fishery was developed quickly. 
There is another sort of crab in approximately the same area, and experi- 
mental fishing results indicate it to be more wide spread and totally abundant 
than the king crab. It is the Tanner crab (of several species) which the 
Canadians (who have recently begun the harvest of a similar species on the 
Atlantic coast) call the Queen crab. Its meat is roughly the same as that of 
the King crab. It can be caught by the same means as King crab but perhaps 
will be more cheaply caught by trawl, bottom tangle net, or a redesigned pot. 
It has not been worked commercially in Alaska until very recently (although 
long an article of commerce with the Japanese and Russians) because of low 
return and the fact that the meat was more difficult (and expensive) to pick. 
There was more tendency in the picking process for meats to be broken, and 
thus be degraded in value through damage in appearance. 
With the decline in abundance of King Crab around Kodiak Island last 
season the catching and marketing of Tanner crab began in earnest. Sufficient 
effort is being put on the technoiogical problems of catching and preparation 
for marketing that these problems are coming to solution. The product is coming 
on the market in substantial volume in 1968 and it is obvious that the fishery 
for this sort of crab is going to grow rapidly in Alaska. 
Dungeness crab is the third sort (after blue and king) of substantial com- 
mercial importance in the United States. It is delicious and commands a good 
market in west coast cities. it is the crab that Joe DiMaggio’s father caught, 
and that made Fishermen’s Wharf in San Francisco famous. Its annual produc- 
tion has averaged in the range 30-40 million pounds for a good many years. 
This rather localized western market used reasonably the full available resource 
off Northern California, Oregon and Washington. It provided a price high enough 
to prevent the extensive canning of this crab but too low to warrant the expan- 
sion of the fishery for it to southeast and central Alaska where the large 
unused resouzce of this sort of crab exists. 
Like the Tanner crab, this crab does not yield as high a ratio of picked meat 
to live weight as do King crab, and the meat is more difficult and costly to 
pick than with King crab. As with the Tanner crab, King crab has now created 
such a national demand for frozen crab meat that with the leveling off of its 
production Dungeness crab is being seriously worked in the Kodiak area and will 
undoubtedly assist in keeping the crab gold rush going. There are substantial 
underfished resources of this crab available in the Gulf of Alaska. 
The flourishing of the King crab fishery in central and western Alaska injected 
a whole new breath of life (and a good deal of money) into the U.S. bottom fish 
(demersal) fishery of the Pacific Northwest. As is always the case, when fisher- 
men make money they pioy it back into new and better boats; when there is a 
market that will show a profit dealers, processors and marketers move in with 
speed, capital and marketing know how; and when there is better meoney to be 
made at sea than ashore vigorous young men recruit to the fishery and give it 
life. All of these things the King crab fishery has done to the Northeast Pacific 
ground fisheries, and the effects are now beginning to spin off to other large 
resources in the area, such as Alaska pink shrimp, scailop, Tanner crab, Dunge- 
ness crab, etc. It will eventually infect the major resources of demersal fin-fish 
that only the Russians and Japanese are fishing heavily in the area now. 
(14) Flounder and the Trawl Fisheries for Groundjish.—Flounder is the name 
given to a large and varied family of fiat fish that are common to the continental 
shelves of the North Atlantic and Pacific. Some species are so particularly deli- 
cious that they have generated their own trade names (English sole, Dover sole, 
black back or yellowtail flounder, fluke, rex sole, etc.). For the most part, how- 
ever, they appear on restaurant menu’s in the United States as fillet of sole. 
The larger species (common halibut) are often steaked and find a ready retail 
market for home use as well as in restaurants. 
The price of flounders is kept high enough by this restaurant and home trade 
that they seldom can form the raw material for the burgeoning market for “fish 
blocks” from which are made fish sticks, portions, chips, sandwiches, ete. This 
caused extreme dissatisfaction among Pacific Northwest fishermen, in particular, 
where there are quite large underutilized resources of most ground fish, including 
a number of species of flounder that are hardly used at all. The fishermen are 
