REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. XXIII 



given locality. Ample evidence to this effect will be found in the tes- 

 timony presented in the present report, as well as in the article on the 

 blue-fish, (page 235.) As there stated, it is a pelagic or wandering fish, 

 going in immense schools, and characterized by a voracity and blood- 

 thirstiness which, perhaps, has no parallel in the animal kingdom. 



The fish seems to live only to destroy, and is constantly employed in 

 pursuing and chopping up whatever it can master. As some one has 

 said, it is an animated choppiog-machine. Sometimes among a school 

 of herring or menhaden thousands of blue-fish will be seen, biting 

 off the tail of one and then another, destroying ten times as many fish 

 as they really need for food, and leaving in their track the surface of the 

 water covered with the blood and fragments of the mangled fish. 



-The blue-fish range in size, when two years of age and over, from 

 five to twelve pounds. I ascertained by a careful inquiry into the 

 number shipped by the dealers along the shore that about a million 

 and a quarter could be estimated as the number captured along through 

 Vineyard Sound and on the coast from MouAnoy Point through Long 

 Island Sound and sent to market in 1S71. Any one who has seen these 

 fish will judge that not one in a hundred is taken. If, now, we admit 

 the presence of 100,000,000 blue-fish in these waters referred to, we may 

 form some estimate of the number of fish destroyed by them. To esti- 

 mate twenty per day as the number destroyed, if not devoured, by each 

 blue-fish, is by no means extravagant, when we bear in mind the result 

 of my own examinations and the testimony of others. 



We all kuow that fish-spawn and fish in different stages of growth 

 constitute the principal source of food to other fishes in the sea, and 

 that the great proportion of fishes devoured are of tender age. The 

 blue-fish, however, will often attack species but little less than itself, and 

 the 100,000,000 referred to probably destroy fishes of two or three 

 ounces and upward ; that is to say, those that have passed the ordinary 

 perils of early life, and have a fair chance to reach maturity. There- 

 fore, if 12,000,000,000 are eaten, the number destroyed off the Kew Eng- 

 land coast in a season of one hundred and twenty to one hundred and 

 fifty days can be easily estimated. 



~No other sea-coast than that of the Atlantic border of the United 

 States can show, as far as our information extends, so destructive a 

 scourge as the blue-fish, occurring in such numbers, of so large a size, and 

 of so massive a frame ; able to cope with and mutilate, if not devour, any 

 other fish of less size. Indeed, I am quite inclined to assign to the 

 blue-fish the very first positiou among the injurious influences that 

 have affected the supply of fishes on the coast. Yet, with all this de- 

 struction by the blue-fish, it is probable that there would not have 

 been so great a decrease of fish as at present but for the concurrent 

 action of man, as we shall endeavor to show farther on. 



Under the fifth head, that of human agencies, we may consider first 

 the question of the 'pollution of the water by poisonous agencies. 



