Mackerel and Oil Sardine Tagging Programme 1966 – 67 to 1968 – 69

The importance of mark-release experiments as a means to understand certain aspects of the biology of fish such as rate of growth,migration, age, stocks and races has long been realised by fishery scientists and considerable work has been done on these lines in the United States of America, United Kingdom and Japan. In India tagging was successfully attempted for the first time on Hilsa in the Hooghly estuary (Pillay, 1959) and subsequently on grey mullets and other brackish water fishes in Chilka Lake (Jhingran and Patro, 1959; Jhingran and Misra, 1962). As a part of field training, the Fisheries Officers of the Central Institute of Fisheries Education, Bombay carried out tagging on major carps (Catla catla, Cirrhina mrigala and Labeo rohita) in Madhya Pradesh and on lesser sardines and mackerel at Panaji, Goa, during July-September 1966 and from 11th to 20th December 1966 respectively (Johannes Hamre et al., 1966). The tagging in these instances was done on large numbers of fish but confined to certain centres only