He spoke about the history of the North American Fisheries Control, now concluding its first decade. For the first time, Canada, Mexico, and the United States had organized together to properly manage and exploit the living resources of the sea. He related how excess heat and water from offshore and onshore fu-
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A Miracle of Smatt Fishes
sion and fission plants had been used to drive nutrients from the ocean floor up to the surface, thus generating controllable and unprecedented population booms among commercially valuable surface-dwelling fish.
He told how the Alaskan king crab industry, once in danger of being fatally overfished, had been managed to the point where it could now support the hungry fleets of six nations and would still increase year by year.
How the cost of Maine lobster had been cut to sixty cents a half-kilo, while lobster fishermen made more money than ever. How the neglected waters off the Yucatan Peninsula now supported the largest natural sponge industry in the world.
And finally, he outlined how the research at Fisheries Control had advised him that the world’s largest yellowtail fishery could be created off the Bahia Sebastian Vizcaino only if enough food fish could be provided to meet the tuna as they were herded northward.
“And to do this,” Senator Petterson concluded for him, “you propose to sacrifice perhaps a hundred thousand tons of one of the finest food fishes in the world, the California sardine.”
“Not sacrifice, Madam Senator. The sardines would spark the first artificial spawning area for the most popular food fish in America. We can improve existing yellowtail fisheries, but the production from one managed and controlled by us from its inception would be a dozen, eventually perhaps a hundred times greater!”