year ago. Thanks to numerous importations from the Mediterranean, the stock pile of squill in this country was increased to approximately a million pounds. Not only did the importations exceed in poundage those of any previous year, but the quality of the raw chips received was superior to that obtained in other recent years. Much of the material revealed a high enough toxicity to permit a reduction in the price of fortified squill. Determinations of the toxicity which led to these developments were made largely in the laboratory of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Samples imported from Italy were found to be comparable in toxicity to those from Algeria, whereas samples from Spain proved, as in former years, to be wholly nontoxic. PREDATOR CONTROL Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service has continued its program of organized hunting throughout the country for the reduction in the abundance of coyotes. This work is carried on primarily to reduce predation of livestock. During the past year, however, an epidemic of rabies among dogs, coyotes, and foxes has necessitated an intensification of this program. The Service has also contributed greatly to the suppression of typhus, a disease endemic in the South, through its rat control work, carried on in cooperation with the States. DEVELOPMENT OF THE RABBIT INDUSTRY The shortage of meat during the war stimulated the development of a rabbit industry, which now gives evidence of continuing growth in the future. This new industry owes a considerable part of its success to the work of the Fish and Wildlife Service Rabbit Experimental Station at Fontana, Calif. There research is carried on to improve methods of managing, feeding, and breeding rabbits; and the results of these studies are made available to the public in a series of booklets. As a result of this research, domestic rabbits now outclass their ancestors of 10 or 15 years ago. They have better meat, finer fur, are more economical to feed, less subject to disease, and breed more true to color, size, and shape. Small business characterizes the United States rabbit industry, most of the meat, fur, and wool being produced in small rabbitries whose owners devote only part of their time to the project. The amount of meat produced is impressive, being somewhere between 15 and 20 million pounds in 1944. ALASKA FUR SEALS-AN EXAMPLE OF A WELLMANAGED RESOURCE One of the finest living examples of an animal resource that was once depleted by imprudent exploitation and restored by good management is the Pribilof Islands (Alaska) fur-seal resource, over which the Fish and Wildlife Service has jurisdiction, Virtually unaffected by the war, the fur-seal herd has continued to yield close to normal returns. The fur-seal industry, estimated to be worth $100,000,000, has returned nearly $20,000,000 as net proceeds to the Treasury since 1867. From a low of about 130,000 seals in 1910, the herd has been restored through wise management practices to 3,000,000 animals, and is providing the Government with an annual net income of over a half-million dollars. Rehabilitation of the 500 inhabitants of the Pribilof Islands, who were returned to the islands in May 1944, made possible the resumption of fur-sealing and related activities upon a normal basis. Sealing operations, however, were somewhat disappointing; the herd as a whole was late in arriving at the islands after their customary winter sojourn to the South. Furthermore, for some reason yet to be discovered, the 3-year-old males, the class from which nearly all killings are made, did not haul out in normal numbers, and the resulting take of 47,652 skins was less than anticipated. Other elements of the herd, however, appeared in usual numbers. Of the sealskins taken, 20 percent, or 9,530, were delivered to a representative of the Canadian Government at Seattle, Washington, in accordance with the Provisional Agreement of 1942 between the United States and Canada, and the remainder were sent to the Fouke Fur Co. at St. Louis, Mo., for processing and sale. During the year two public auction sales were held at St. Louis for the account of the Government. At the auction held October 9, 1944, 22,393 dressed and dyed skins, and 169 unfinished skins were sold for a total of $823,500.75. On April 9, 1945, there were sold at public auction 22,682 dressed and dyed Pribilof Islands sealskins and 4 confiscated sealskins for a total of $811,992.75. In addition, there were sold at private sales for promotional purposes under special authorization, 214 dressed and dyed skins for $8,467.50. All of the sales were made at ceiling prices established by the Office of Price Administration. THE MENACE OF POLLUTION The distribution of all animals is controlled by the distribution of water. Even the most desiccated looking desert creatures, whose bodies are magnificently adapted to living in dry climates, cannot live permanently without it. Furthermore, each kind of animal depends for its living on a particular water habitat. Desert-living animals cannot live in marshes; marsh-dwellers cannot survive long in open lakes. Any change, however slight, in the water or the environment surrounding it affects the animal populations depending on it. But the progress of industrialization in the United States also depends on the distribution of water. For various reasons, industrial centers tend to become established close to large rivers, or bays on the seacoast; and from the beginning, they have defiled those rivers and bays with sewage and factory wastes. The effect on animal resources has been so wastefully destructive that pollution is now one of the most serious and complex of conservation problems occupying the attention of the Fish and Wildlife Service. The Service has for the past 10 years carried on a series of experiments in various parts of the country to establish minimal standards of water purity necessary for the support of aquatic life. This information is required as a basis for effective control measures. It has been established that stream pollutants, regardless of their source, can be grouped into three classes: those which disturb the balance and general conditions of nature required to maintain aquatic life, those which have specific toxic action on fish or other aquatic forms, and those which combine both hazards. The first group includes various effluents, both municipal and industrial, which reduce the dissolved oxygen, alter the acid-alkali balance of water, increase turbidity and reduce light penetration, blanket the bottom with unproductive materials, or otherwise modify general stream conditions. The second and third groups may be considered together because of the common hazard of toxicity to living things. In these groups are various metallic poisons, acids, dyes, organic compounds and sulfur derivates, noxious gases, such as chlorine and methane, and compounds like cyanids which enter the streams as by products or wastes from numerous types of industrial activities. During recent years effluents of these types have been increasing in quantity and have been introduced into new areas as a result of the expansion and dispersion of industry of all types, particularly of war-munitions manufacture. To an already long list of industrial wastes known to be harmful to aquatic life have been added new kinds and additional quantities of harmful wastes from explosives plants, rayon mills, and synthetics manufacture. Not only has the quantity of waste materials increased from these processes, but, under the pressure of war, and with the shortage of materials for the construction of treatment and purification equipment, less attention has been given to either the recovery of useful and valuable byproducts, or to the treatment of harmful wastes for which no profitable market has been found. It is extremely difficult to establish national standards of water purity necessary to safeguard aquatic resources. Experiments conducted by the Fish and Wildlife Service over many years have demonstrated that even the lethal limits of many specifically poisonous substances cannot be defined. This is because slight changes in the acidity or salt content of water, the dissolved oxygen, and the natural ability of water to neutralize acids, will materially alter the toxicity of many compounds. Copper sulfate, for example, was found to be toxic to most fish and aquatic animals in the water of one stream even when diluted with 4 million parts of pure water, while in another stream a concentration four times as great was readily tolerated by the same species because of differences in the amounts of other dissolved salts carried by the two streams. Instead of being subject to uniform Nation-wide standards of water purity which government and industry could apply confidently, each stream or river basin presents individual problems which must be studied on the ground. Pollution abatement practices must be developed for each particular situation if our aquatic resources are to be protected. Thus pollution is controllable only on local and State levels. At the same time, it is a national problem and it is the duty of the National Government to furnish guidance for the abatement of this nuisance. During the past year, the Fish and Wildlife Service has compiled the results of its long study on this subject in a bulletin entitled, "The Determination of Water Quality." This work, now in press, is designed to serve as a guide to those engaged in pollution control. EFFECT OF WATER UTILIZATION PROJECTS ON ANIMAL RESOURCES During recent years, a movement has been gathering momentum to develop all the inland waterways to their fullest extent, so as to utilize, by means of systems of dams, the flow and gradient of each river and its many tributaries to serve the purposes of navigation, irrigation, power and flood control. Although this development will undoubtedly proceed over a long period of time, a number of major constructions are planned to be under way in various parts of the country within the next five years. The Fish and Wildlife Service is one of several Government agencies that are working together to achieve the maximum national benefits from these projects. Its particular function in this respect is to devise means of minimizing the inevitable damage which animal populations living around the affected water courses must suffer when their environment is changed. Like the pollution problem, no rules or principles exist or could ever be devised to solve the conservation problems of all water-use projects. When a single dam is considered by itself, it is usually possible to devise modifications that will help a migrating fish population like salmon to surmount it with no serious losses. When one dam is followed by a succession of others, blocking the upper reaches of a stream where the spawning grounds are located, the conservation problems become acute indeed. An example of such a situation is the Columbia River, where a vast system of water-use projects is under development. One unit of this system is the Bonneville Dam, completed in 1938. Scientists of the United States Bureau of Fisheries (now part of the Fish and Wildlife Service) effected the safe passage of salmon over this dam by means of "fish ladders"; that is, a rising succession of pools, which the fish can easily traverse. A second unit of this system is the Grand Coulee Dam, which is too high for the salmon to surmount by any device. Here the fish were trapped and thence hauled overland by truck to tributaries below the dam. This bold experiment was attempted for the first time in 1944. The salmon were transplanted according to plan, they ascended the tributaries into which they had been introduced, and spawned successfully; and their young, guided by the memory of their infant experience, will return naturally to their adopted tributaries. Getting the young salmon downstream with minimum mortality is another problem to be solved. Experiments designed to determine the extent of the mortality of downstream-migrating juvenile salmon in passing Bonneville Dam were continued by the marking of fingerlings and liberating them above and below the dam. Returns to date indicate considerable variation in mortality, ranging from 5 to 50 percent, and further studies are needed on the subject. Meanwhile, special attention is being given to the various water-use projects proposed for the Columbia River Basin and their probable effect on the fishery resources. Ways and means of successfully caring for the fish at each structure or series of structures are being devised. A vastly expanded program of investigations has been formulated to obtain information necessary for the maintenance of the fishery resources under the proposed new conditions and preliminary studies are under way. A similar plan of salvaging salmon at the has been seriously hampered by the war. Shasta Dam in California |