Note préliminaire sur l'anchois (Engraulis encrassicholus L.) du golfe de Gascogne.

In his work about Clupeidae and Egraulidae, FAGE (1920) describes the European anchovy's main characters and differentiates two races: a Mediterranean race and an Atlantic one, with different biological and morphological characters. He also divides the Atlantic race into a northern group (North Sea) and a southern group (Bay of Biscay) "looking biologically similar, but distinguishing from each other through the constitution of their backbone". F. DE BUEN (1931) summarizes the works of the authors who have studied the European anchovy. Putting forward some statistics about fisheries in the Cantabrian Sea, he writes that, in the Bay of Biscay, anchovy is fished all year long, but the larger catches are from April to May, during the breeding period. ARNÉ (193 1) checks and validates the results obtained by these authors. In this note, in order to add more data to the morphological characters of the anchovy, I looked for more differences between males and females and studied the size, age and sexual maturity of different batches collected from fisheries in Saint-Jean-de-Luz all through year 1941. (unverified OCR)