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United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries
For the next thirty years, the Commission deployed its research vessels on the nation's rivers, lakes and oceans, trained fishery agents to document the catches landed in American and Canadian fishing ports, actively corresponded with scientists, fisherman and naturalists around the world, set up large scale salmon hatcheries in New England and the Pacific Northwest, used a floating hatchery to replenish shad in East Coast rivers and considered the effect on fish and other marine life of the new petroleum pollution. For the first time, a detailed description emerged of the ecology, distribution and abundance of North America's wild fishes, shellfish, plankton and marine mammals, and of the impact on them of the extensive, intensive commercial fishing, whaling and sealing of the 19th and early 20th centuries. |
How To Read These Documents:
1871-72 Articles * Report
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These lengthy reports (800 - 1,200 pages each, including plates and photographs) are essential reading for anyone interested in the ecology of our rivers lakes and oceans before chemical pollution, habitat destruction and mechanized trawl fisheries degraded our marine and freshwater ecology. 1892 Articles * Report
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