Living Silver 



flicked hard at the sea's surface, with silent and unexpected speed 

 toward a nearby sand eel or an unsuspecting shrimp. A single snap 

 of the jaws would follow and the flatfish became as invisible as 

 before. The ticklers were needed because these flatfish were, 

 for the fishermen, the best things in the sea. He could exist on 

 roundfish. If he wanted to live, though, he had to catch some 

 flatties . 



At first Jan thought them among the oddest brutes ever created. 

 They were not fish. They were grotesques from a cathedral but- 

 tress that had been submerged in the Flood and brought to life by 

 the artificial respiration of the rhythmic weight of the tides . They 

 were biologically impossible, their tiny guts compressed into the 

 foremost fourth of their bodies, their jaws angled into impotence 

 and both eyes perched on the same side of their heads. Yet, when 

 he grew to know the evolutionary cycle more fully, he realised 

 that they were but one more manifestation of the continual, the 

 almost regular, recurrence of different yet similar living forms. 

 Time and time again it had happened, and the intervals had ex- 

 tended over millions of years, that animals had been flattened by 

 the weight of the seas, and their anatomy changed to conform to 

 the wad-of-paper pattern that could best support high pressures. 

 Fish evolved not once, but at least three times and, at each appear- 

 ance, they began as slim and slippery threads of life : but further 

 evolution always took them forwards or back to the squat disc- 

 shaped outline of one kind of flatfish or another. 



Most of these species had become extinct, as most life had been 

 extinguished in the centuries of change that brought men to them- 

 selves. But it was still flatfish that competed with the dominant 

 gadoids for the supremacy of the seas. And they were hunted, 

 with equal intensity, by the international fleets of trawlers. As 

 with the roundfish, it was a single family that made the bulk of the 

 catch — the pleuronectids . But it was a more divergent family than 

 the gadoids and zoologists were continually shuffling it into new 

 order. It was more divergent because there were no portmanteau 

 species, like the cod, that spread themselves over most of the en- 



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