the United States had not then . . . recognized the Soviet 

 Government in Russia, it declined to join in any conference or 

 to discuss any new agreement with Soviet Union representa- 

 tives" (Ireland 1942:406). 



Many years after Ishino's second visit in 1926 we found out 

 the main reason for it. About 1925, Japanese fishery agents 

 first learned that Pribilof-marked seals were showing up on the 

 Commander Islands, on Robben Island, and in waters off 

 Japan (Japanese Bureau of Fisheries 1933). Ishino wrote that 

 "when I went to the Commandovsky (sic) group in 1925 ... I 

 happened to find there several animals bearing tags [they could 

 only have been brands or sheared areas] of the Pribilof 

 Islands. I found some of these marks also at Seal [Robben] 

 Island . . . [My idea on intermingling] was then communi- 

 cated to the American authorities who, however, refused to ac- 

 cept my theory" [Isino (sic) 1939:43-44]. Twenty-five years 

 elapsed from the first notice of intermingling in 1925 until 

 Austin and Wilke (1950:34) made the first attempt to estimate 

 the magnitude of it. 



When, therefore, Ishino arrived on the Pribilofs in 1926 he 

 arranged that "for the purpose of investigating the route 

 of . . . migration, special marks should be put on males of 

 three years of age each year for three years after 1926 at both 

 the American and Japanese breeding grounds" (Japanese 

 Bureau of Fisheries 1933:11-12). Accordingly, in July 1927, 

 Pribilof Superintendent Harry J. Christoffers placed small 

 aluminum fish tags on the flippers of 200 bachelor seals esti- 

 mated to be 3-yr-olds. He repeated the tagging in 1928 and 

 1929 (Scheffer 1950d:8). The experiments were not publicized, 

 though they were recorded in the St. Paul Island log. Subse- 

 quently, 28 tags were recovered on the Pribilofs, 28 in waters 

 off Japan, and 1 on the Commander Islands. 



We believe that all of the rookeries were photographed from 

 land stations in 1925, though not mentioned in the published 

 annual report for that year. (See under photographs for 1948.) 



Ten fur seal heads were collected from the killing fields in 

 1926, packed in dry salt, and shipped to A. Gerson Carmel, 

 Department of Anatomy, University of Cincinnati. Carmel 

 published in 1928 (p. 347) a beautiful roentgenogram of one of 

 the heads. 



In the summer of 1928, Harry W. May of the Fouke Fur 

 Company first visited the Pribilofs. Except for the war year 

 1942, he returned each summer through 1962 and again in 

 1965, setting a record of 35 summers on the islands. During 

 most of the later years he was in charge of island operations 

 (curing and barreling) for the Company. He retired in Septem- 

 ber 1965. 



The first Soviet visitors to the islands spend 1 1 d there in 

 June 1929, "observing fur seals and making general observa- 

 tions of the activities" (Bower 1930:333). They were Leonty 

 Vasilievich Boitsoff and Titus Ardeevich Malkovich. 



In 1930, the practice of killing seals in autumn was discon- 

 tinued (Bower 1931:80). During most years from the beginning 

 of U.S. ownership a small fraction of the annual harvest had 

 been taken in autumn, mainly to provide the Aleuts with food. 

 The so-called "food killings" had dwindled to 800 seals in 

 1929. 



A fur seal breeding in captivity was first recorded in the Na- 

 tional Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., in 1932. Two 

 males and four females, all about 2 yr old, had been delivered 

 to the Park in 1928. On 31 July 1932, the only survivor gave 

 birth to a stillborn pup (Bower 1929:323, 1933:72). 



Japan had opened negotiations in 1926 to revise the Fur Seal 

 Treaty and she did so again in 1936, to no avail. The Japanese 

 "built their whole case on the unproved assumption that the 

 wintering seal population off Japan is composed of most of 

 the Commander and Robben Island seals, plus one-half the 

 Pribilof herds" (Austin and Wilke 1950:25). The claimed an- 

 nual damage to the Japanese commercial fishery as a result of 

 predation by seals was about $7 million. 



R. A. Partridge, a student from the University of Cincin- 

 nati, visited the Pribilofs about 1936 and systematically col- 

 lected samples of skin from six bachelor seals. He later pub- 

 lished an analysis of lipid materials (Partridge 1938). 



Nothing had been known of the food habits of fur seals dur- 

 ing migration south of the Gulf of Alaska. In the 1930's, four 

 studies were carried on by fishery agencies of the United States 

 and Canada, designed to evaluate the importance of predation 

 by seals upon salmon and other commercial fishes (Clemens 

 and Wilby 1933; Clemens et al. 1936; Schultz and Rafn 1936; 

 May 1937). The results were summarized by Scheffer 

 (1950f:8-9). Altogether, 256 seal stomachs containing food 

 were purchased from Indians at Sitka, Alaska; at points along 

 the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia; and at 

 La Push, Wash. The principal food remains, listed in order of 

 frequency were: Pacific herring, Clupea harengus pallasi; 

 squid; smelt; salmon; greenling; and pilchard. Pacific herring 

 appeared in stomachs more often than all other food species 

 combined. After the 1930's, no food habit studies were made 

 until Kenyon visited Sitka in March 1950. 



The first aerial survey of the rookeries was made in 1938, 

 when Pribilof Superintendent Harry J. Christoffers "made a 

 trip from the [St. Paul] village landing to Northeast Point and 

 return" in a small seaplane from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter 

 Chelan (Christoffers 1940:162). Motion pictures and still pic- 

 tures taken by the Coast Guard did not show the seals dis- 

 tinctly. 



On 1 July 1939, the Bureau of Fisheries, Department of 

 Commerce, and the Bureau of Biological Survey, Department 

 of Agriculture, were transferred to the Department of the In- 

 terior. A year later, on 30 June 1940, the two Bureaus were 

 merged to form the Fish and Wildlife Service (Sater 1960:9). 



THE MODERN PERIOD, 1940-64 



Establishment of Continuous Research, 1940-51 



Preface 



Some information on research during the modern period is 

 available in scientific journals or special Government reports; 

 some is scattered through the published annual reports of the 

 fur seal industry through 1956; much of it is contained in un- 

 published administrative reports. Annual progress reports of 

 the Marine Mammal Biological Laboratory have now started 

 to appear in print. In the following section, where the source 

 of a statement is not shown, it is manuscript material in the 

 research files of the Laboratory. While the headings by year 

 are shown, scientific studies are not necessarily described in 

 chronological order. The origin of a project or idea is dated by 

 the initial year; it may be followed by a description of later, 

 long-time developments. 



26 



i 



