Discovery of the Golden Tile in the 1800's

[Double D]

I thought these were pretty interesting

Oceanography owes salute to 1879 landing of tilefish

In the 1970s, tilefish put Barnegat Light on the map as an important seafood port. A century earlier, the goggle-eyed fish with striking yellow highlights helped American scientists start the modern science of oceanography.

Records of the old United States Fish Commission credit the discovery of tilefish to a Capt. Kirby from Gloucester, Mass., who pulled in a number of specimens while fishing for cod and hake in May 1879.

Kirby sent one of his fish to the National Museum in Washington, D.C., where it was classified as a new species. That attracted the interest of Spencer Fullerton Baird, a pioneering zoologist.

"Professor Baird took great interest in the discovery of this new fish," noted the 1898 bulletin of the federal fish commission. "Its fine flavor and attractive appearance indicated excellent marketable qualities, and its great abundance promised to be a profitable source of income to offshore fishermen."

Baird used the discovery of a new, exploitable species as one pitch to get more federal dollars for science. That helped persuade Congress to fund the nation's first purpose-built oceanographic vessel, the 243-foot steamer Albatross, in 1883.

Just a few years after Kirby's discovery, tilefish disappeared from much of their New England and Mid-Atlantic range. Scientists think the fish were victims of a deep mass of cold water that moved through the region during 1882, in association with a shift in the Gulf Stream, the offshore river of warm water circulating through the Atlantic.

The Albatross crew spent several seasons searching without success for tilefish. In 1889 scientist William Libby Jr. began a new series of investigations, charting bottom water temperatures to assess environmental conditions.

By 1892, Libby figured out what biologists today would call a predictive model: a correlation between precise temperatures and the biological requirements of tilefish. Libby accurately predicted that tilefish would re-establish themselves on the old grounds during the 1890s as water temperatures trended up.

The fish began to show up again on scientists' hooks. In their 1898 bulletin, scientists reported that "the presence of large numbers of young fish is of considerable biological importance, for it indicates that the fish are breeding, and that those now found on the old tilefish ground are not there as a result of migration."

Those early researchers took it as an example of nature's vagaries, and a cause for optimism in fisheries: "Its history is of scientific interest, since it furnishes evidence that life on the sea bottom is subject to periodic modification, and that a species almost annihilated may become quickly re-established."

The original reports: Note that they were setting near Atlantis Canyon

http://www.penbay.org/usfc/usfc1898_tilefishreport.html

[gottaflylee]

Great read!!! Just goes to show you that we had "Radical" changes way back then and its is not all the "Gobal Warming", gloom and doom that they talk about today. Now don't get me wrong here, yes we have some major issues happing, but just note that we also had it in the 1800's also...