The Flatties 



vironments occupied by the other members of the tribe. Each 

 pleuronectid had its own territory, its own ecological niche as the 

 text-books put it, and it was incapable of moving out of this envir- 

 onment though, within it, the fish was so well adapted as to be 

 nearly invulnerable. The species, that is, was invulnerable, though 

 many individuals might perish. 



PLAICE 



When Jan first encountered them he mixed them up with that 

 other tribe of flatties, the skates, but again the mating behaviour 

 proved fundamental when he wanted to decide on their genetical 

 relationships. Again he had to go back to sex, the sex that was 

 kindled in the sludge of an amoeba and that exploded into poetry 

 when Solomon was a boy ; and back, too, to the juvenile fish. The 

 flatfish did not copulate like their more primitive neighbours 

 the skates ; for they were bony fish, more closely related to round- 

 fish like the haddock than to depressed cartiliginous fishes. They 

 had learned to use their medium, the water, even in this most eso- 

 teric of activities, the act of reproduction. And the young fish, 

 too, was like a salmon, like a cod, like an ordinary roundfish. It 

 was round and elongated, swimming with an undulation of its 



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