Fishery bulletin of the Fish and Wildlife Service - NOAA

2 FISHERY BULLETIN OF THE FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE
The North Carolina State Department of Conservation and Development also contributed
to the striped bass investigation in the fall of 1937, and thus made it possible
to accumulate valuable information from the Albemarle Sound region in November
1937 and March, April, and May, 1938.
The author has published a preliminary account of the results of the striped
bass investigation through December 1936 (Merriman, 1937a). A review covering
much of the same material has also appeared in the Transactions of the Second North
American Wildlife Conference (Merriman, 1937b), and a paper given at the New
England Game Conference on February 12, 1938, and the Third North American
Wildlife Conference on February 14, 1938, was published later (Merriman, 1938).
Several progress reports submitted to the Connecticut State Board of Fisheries and
Game have been mimeographed and sent out in limited numbers. This bulletin,
therefore, incorporates some previously published material as well as the main
accomplishments of the investigation from its inception to its conclusion.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Since the author was a graduate student in the Department of Zoology at Yale
University during the whole course of this investigation, the facilities of the Osboru
Zoological Laboratory were always at his disposal. He especially wishes to acknowledge
the help and advice of Prof. A. E. Parr, Director of the Peabody Museum.
He is also indebted to Mr. Marshall B. Bishop of the Peabody Museum for his excellent
work in the field in North Carolina in the spring of 1938, to Mr. Donald L. Pitcher
of the Bingham Océanographie Laboratory, and to many members of the Osborn
Zoological Laboratory and the Peabody Museum for their assistance at various
times. Furthermore, the investigation owes much of its progress to Mr. Otto J.
Scheer, of New York, who made it possible to tag striped bass at Montauk, L. I.,
N. Y., in the spring and fall of 1937, to Mr. J. D. Chalk, Commissioner of Game and
Inland Fisheries in North Carolina, to Mr. David A. Aylward and Mr. Oliver H. P.
Rodman of the Massachusetts Fish and Game Association, and to a number of
commercial fishermen and sport fishermen's clubs.
It is also a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of Mr. Earl E. Sisson, who was
employed by the Connecticut State Board of Fisheries and Game to aid in the seining
and tagging of striped bass. And finally, the writer wishes to express his sincere
thanks to ms wife, who has done most of the recording in the field and has given her
support in every possible way.
DESCRIPTION OF THE STRIPED BASS
During the past few years the striped bass has been called Roccus saxatilis and
Roccus lineatus. These two specific names have been used about equally in the literature,
and with more or less indiscrimination. Jordan, Evermann, and Clark (1930)
say:
This species is usually called Roccus lineatus after Sciaena lineata Bloch (Ausländische Fische,
VI, 1792, 62) ; but it cannot be the same. The form, serrae of the preopercle, and the stout spines
of the fin, as well as the asserted locality 'Mediterranean' indicate that the species concerned is
Dicentrarchus lupus of Europe. The only resemblance to Roccus is found in the striped color; but
Bloch says that the stripes on the sides are yellow.
A glance at Bloch's (loc. cit.) illustration substantiates this statement. The name
Roccus saxatilis (Walbaum) therefore appears to be the more valid, and lately it
has come into more widely accepted usage.
Two common names are regularly applied to this species. North of New Jersey
"striped bass" is almost universally used, while to the south "rock" or "rockfish" is
the generally accepted terminology. Among other names that have been applied in
the past, but are seldom if ever heard now, are "green-heads", "squid-hounds" (Goode,
1884), and "missuckeke-kequock" (Jordan, Evermann, and Clark, loc. cit.).
The striped bass, Roccus saxatilis, belongs to the family Serranidae, of the order
Percomorphi. It has been well described in most of the standard ichthyological references
for both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (e. g., Hildebrand and Schroeder,