Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
parts of the country. The most successful introduction was likely the
Striped Bass. In 1879, after California's fish commissioners decided Striped
Bass would enhance the region's fisheries, their envoys pulled 132 stripers
out of a New Jersey river, put them on a train, and released them in the
Carquinez Strait. Soon afterward, they relocated another 300 live fish from
Jersey to a new West Coast home in Suisun Bay near Benicia.
The Striped Bass certainly took to West Coast living. Just 20 years later,
commercial fishers caught over one million pounds of this species. Striped
Bass soon became not only a valued food item and commercial fishery but
also a prized angling catch, which it remains to this day.
Though the beaches south of San Mateo glistened white from the native
oyster shells, early nineteenth century diners preferred the larger, plumper,
whiter oysters familiar from Boston and New York dinner tables over the
smaller, leaner, browner California native. The bay's sheltered temperate
Workers cull oysters grown in San Francisco Bay by Morgan Oyster Company in
1889. As a teen, Oakland writer Jack London pirated oysters from cultivated beds
like these, then joined the fledgling California fish patrol in 1892 to enforce early
fishing laws. He recounts these adventures in
Tales of the Fish Patrol
. (Gulf of
Maine Cod Project, NOAA Marine Sanctuaries, Courtesy of the National Archives)
