Watermen have expressed the opinion that commercial fish production varies considerably from one Virginia estuary to another. Preliminary surveys of the young fishes present in the various rivers have suggested that the relative abundance of young fishes also differs from river to river. The surface trawl (Massmann, Ladd, and McCutcheon, 1952) has been used to obtain quantitative information on the distribution and relative abundance of young fishes in five major Virginia estuaries
