New Records for Juvenile Albacore— Yoshida 
443 
Fig. 1. Tracks of the "Charles H. Gilbert,” cruises 48, 55, 57, and 59 (June I960 to November 1962). 
than of adult tunas (Yabe et al., 1958), and 
because it was not possible to sample all the 
fishes landed at the markets, emphasis was 
placed on sampling the spearfishes. 
Other stomachs sampled were from fishes 
caught by longlining on four cruises of the 
"Charles H. Gilbert” during the period covered 
by this study and from fishes caught during 
the 1962 Hawaiian International Billfish Tour- 
nament held at Kona, Hawaii, from July 31 
through August 4, 1962. The cruise tracks of 
the "Charles H. Gilbert” are shown in Figure 1. 
IDENTIFICATION OF JUVENILE ALBACORE 
As would be expected of specimens found 
in stomachs, our juvenile albacore specimens 
were in various stages of digestion. Specimens 
that retained most of their flesh were easily 
recognized as scombrids by the body contours 
and shape of the head (Fig. 2). Aside from 
the general shape, few of the external features 
of the specimens had escaped digestion suffi- 
ciently to be of any use in species identification. 
However, this was not a serious handicap, since 
the hard parts of the fish were relied upon for 
identification. In two of the specimens practi- 
cally all of the flesh had been digested away and 
all that remained were the bony parts, but even 
these fish could be identified as albacore. 
Yabe et al. ( 1958) discovered a striking ver- 
tebral character that is distinctive for albacore 
and used it in identifying juvenile albacore as 
