FISHERY CONSERVATION*

BY SEYMOUR BOWER

Much is being said and written nowadays about the conservation of natural resources, the mines, the forests, and the products of the great rivers and lakes and seas and oceans, and of their relations with what we may call cultivated resources, such as the products of the soil. It seems obvious that as time goes on and population increases, these earthwide necessities must be produced in ever-increasing volume, and it is equally obvious that this is possible only through the discovery of hidden resources and the constant recreation of current resources on a scale of increasing magnitude. The extent to which these great resources may be drawn upon for current necessities, may be consumed without danger of exhaustion or even depletion, is at once the most vital and complex problem that confronts the human race.

The great resources of the earth, including those that are cultivated and to a great extent under control, as well as those still in reserve in a wild or virgin state, may be divided into many groups and sub-groups, each presenting its own peculiar and widely varying problems, or in some cases practically no problems at all. For example, we need feel no special concern with respect to the precious metals, and perhaps some of the coarser ones, because while the mines that produce them cannot be restored when exhausted, the metals themselves are not consumed or destroyed to any extent, like coal, which is eliminated utterly and eternally when once its stored-up energies have been utilized.

Forests and forestry in their relations to the fisheries and the scheme of things generally, present an entirely different set of problems, mainly because, unlike the products of the

* President's opening address,

mineral world, they may be reproduced or restored. True, the time required is so long, an average of two or more generations, that timber culture is not an inviting or attractive field for private enterprise. The average man, indeed more than 99 per cent of mankind, must realize on his investments and the fruits of his industry at far shorter intervals than is possible with timber culture. It is practically certain therefore that forests once laid low will be reproduced or restored to any extent only as initiative and control are assumed by states and nations. I think all will agree that mountainous and other regions of public domain ill suited to agriculture but capable of growing some kind or kinds of timber should be set aside for forestry purposes and to perpetuate our springs and sources of water supply. But the extent to which good agricultural lands now timbered should be so reserved, or cleared lands surrendered, is a most vital problem in conservation. Personally

I believe that the solution lies in the direction of scientific timber culture, under governmental control or at least under governmental direction. Virgin forests should be utilized and gradually give way to scientific tree culture. There is no good reason why timber under cultivation should not show the same relative increase in results as do other cultivated products of the soil, or as do cultivated and controlled fishery preserves as compared with those that are wild or uncontrolled.

Referring for a moment to the influence of forests over the character and product of the smaller lakes and streams, I believe that we should take broad ground and consider the food problem as a whole and not solely in the interests of these minor fisheries. By this I mean, for illustrationand perhaps some will cry treason-that if a section of timber must be left standing indefinitely and the lands withheld from agriculture, in order to preserve a few trout streams as such, then the timber and the trout should go. On the other hand, timber belts bordering such splendid trout waters as the Au Sable and other rivers in Michigan and

elsewhere, should be preserved or replaced, for here the conditions are reversed. The soil for the most part being poor, the actual food value of these streams is much greater than the potential food value of the lands through which they flow.

The fisheries of the great rivers and lakes and seas and oceans present a far different, and in some respects a more difficult, set of problems than the mines and forests. One reason is that, unlike mines that cannot be restored at all, and forests that may be replaced only at long intervals, most species of fish become adults at three or four years of age and are then capable of reproducing themselves or of being reproduced annually. The main reason, however, is that the vast expanses which are their home, nearly threefourths of the earth's surface, are for the most part in a state of nature. This means that they are in a condition of savagery, subject to no law save that of the survival of the fittest, but it does not mean that we are powerless to amend that cruel law, that we may not in some degree bring order out of chaos, and thus add enormously to the food possibilities of the state and national and international water domains of the earth. Indeed, more than one amendment to this law has already been passed. Perhaps the most important of these modifications is protected or controlled propagation, which multiplies natural hatching percentages a hundred, or, in some cases, a thousand fold. This wonderful increase in the creation of infant fish is accomplished by the simple expedient of insuring fertilization. of all of the ova and then protecting those ova from most, if not all, of their natural enemies.

But fish culture in its broadest sense means far more than mere fish hatching, however great importance we may attach to this particular feature of production. Fish hatching solves only one of the many important problems involved in fishery conservation. If we are to utilize the waters to their fullest practicable limit, we must know far more than we do concerning the food, the breeding habits, the range, the

enemies, the diseases-in short, the life history and interrelations of all water life from the lowest forms up. Clearly the gigantic task of solving the problems involved in a comprehensive knowledge of water life may be worked out only by the exact and patient and persistent and exhaustive methods of scientific investigation. Every state and nation, all alike vitally interested in the food problem, whether they have direct fishery interests or not, should therefore keep continuously in service a corps of scientists and specialists whose life work is the study and solution of fishery problems. Every lead should be followed out and every clue run down-in short, every minor as well as major problem should be attacked from every possible angle and every point of vantage.

The necessity as time goes on of drawing more and more on the resources of the sea will be apparent when we reflect that we do not need to look so very far into the future to see practically all of the arable lands of the earth occupied and cultivated. True, irrigation will add considerable areas of highly productive soil, and evaporation and drainage and the building of dykes and levees will continue to expose and reclaim many thousands of acres of the most fertile. lands on earth, made so by ages of soil wash from surrounding elevations. But, after all, only a small fraction of soil waste in the aggregate may be so recovered. suspension and solution, the streams and mighty rivers of the earth are annually pouring thousands upon thousands of tons of the most fertile elements of the soil into lakes and seas, where for the most part they are utterly beyond reclamation except indirectly through the fisheries.

In

Obviously the more the soil is stirred or cultivated the more rapidly does this process of land exhaustion by soil. wash go on. With accelerating speed therefore are the water basins of the earth growing richer and richer and the land areas correspondingly poorer and poorer. But this unceasing drainage of elementary food wealth from the soil to the sea does not necessarily mean that it is irretrievably