MIGRATIONS OF COD 
33 
Corroborating the evidence furnished by the fishery that nearly all the cod which 
winter west of Nantucket Shoals leave there by spring, we have definite proof from 
tagged fish that a great part of these cod return to the grounds off southern Massa- 
chusetts to spend the summer. (Fig. 11.) Thus many of the cod tagged off No Mans 
Land and Woods Hole by Smith (1902) and on the present investigation (p. 26) sum- 
mered on Nantucket Shoals, and 2 of the 7 cod that were recaptured from the 166 
tagged on the Cholera Bank in November, 1927, had swum eastward, 1 to be recap- 
tured December 26, 1927, off Easthampton, N. Y. (about 75 miles eastward from the 
Cholera Bank), and the other on May 15, 1928, on Nantucket Shoals. In addition, 
the 1 recapture to be reported from the 133 cod tagged off Atlantic City in March 
Figure 11. — Recaptures made off eastern Long Island and in the Nantucket Shoals region of cod 
tagged during the winter off Long Island (black triangle), Atlantic City (black disk), and Cape 
May (black square) 
and April, 1928, was taken on Nantucket Shoals July 22, 1928, and 3 of the fish 
tagged off Cape May the winter of 1928-29 were recaptured in the Nantucket-South 
Channel region the following August and October. (Table 13.) 
These 6 recaptured fish which showed a migration from west to east out of a total 
of 1,183 tagged to the westward of Rhode Island since 1927 represent a return of only 
0.51 per cent, where the returns from the east to west migration have averaged 1.09 
per cent out of 22,228 tagged on Nantucket Shoals up to the end of 1928. But if 
thousands of cod had been tagged west of Rhode Island as they were to the eastward 
on Nantucket Shoals, and if we had on the shoals the great intensity of sport and 
commercial fishing which is carried on in the New York-New Jersey region, it is very 
