638 
BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES 
except at Smeaton Bay. Trollers probably made considerable catches in the canal 
but failed to allocate their catches. Inasmuch as king salmon are found on the feeding 
grounds, often far from the streams they will eventually ascend to spawn, the lack of 
complete catch records for a given district is not a serious matter, as the presence of 
kings in many localities does not constitute a run in the sense that they are approach- 
ing a definite stream. Often the schools are composed of salmon of different ages and 
from several runs, so that catches of king salmon in Behm Canal do not necessarily 
mean that they were exclusively Behm Canal fish. This condition exists in respect of 
kin gs perhaps more than to any other species, and the fluctuations in catches are 
meaningless in determining the increase or decrease of runs in all such places. 
The pink salmon fisheries have yielded fairly large catches in some years and 
extremely pooronesinotheryears,butwithout the definite recurring biennial variations 
which were observed in some other districts. From 1922 to 1926, a period of 5 years, 
catches were fairly uniform, but 1927 shows the smallest return the district had known 
in 20 years, indicating beyond question a real scarcity of pink salmon. The total 
catch was only 228,515, notwithstanding that 43 traps were located in the canal that 
season. With this exception, the fishery has shown no evidence of decline in recent 
years and appears in fact to be even more productive, although the regulation of 
fishing in this period was more drastic than ever before. 
