The Flatties 



Round, flat, round, flat. Two parallel processes. No one point 

 in either system ever met a point in the other. 



It was the difference that counted, though. If flatties had been 

 roundfish, fishermen would have been much poorer. They hit the 

 ground and ceased to be roundfish. They became plaice ; they fed 

 in the shallow grounds ; they grew ; they moved out into deeper 

 water; they grew; and deeper; and grew; and grew. Slowly, as 

 they moved into ever deepening areas, they became a better take 

 for a trawl, and a more unlikely one : for as the population moved 

 out it dispersed, and the plaice became ever more difficult to catch 

 in quantity. And the increase in the size of the fish seldom made 

 up for this decrease in their numbers. It was not even certain that 

 there would be any considerable increase in size. Certain bays, 

 quite shallow ones, supported heavy populations of young fish that 

 were almost as large as the fully matured adults of many parts of 

 the open North Sea. There was, indeed, a great deal of inconsis- 

 tency in the growth rates of plaice. A bay might be filled with 

 brawny two-year-olders while a neighbouring inlet, four miles 

 down the coast, was populated with the puny products of three 

 long winters. These differences, often quite startling to the scien- 

 tifically minded, suggested that each small feeding area supported 

 an indigenous population, sharply differentiated and delimited 

 from the populations of surrounding areas. Only by postulating 

 that the populations did not mix, was it possible to account for 

 the radical differences in growth rate. 



Some experiences and a few experiments, however, contradic- 

 ted this neat hypothesis. Bright plastic tags had been pinned into 

 the bodies of vagrant plaice and the fish thrown back alive into the 

 sea. Days, weeks, months, years later, one of these same fish 

 would be caught, and the tag would tell where it had last been ob- 

 served. Had there been a sharp segregation between the commun- 

 ities of neighbouring bays, then these fish would have been found 

 to have stayed on their home grounds between the times of their 

 release and recapture. But that was not what happened. Often, 

 and disconcertingly, individual plaice would be found to have un- 



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