Living Silver 



few months, they would all hatch out into microscopic and free- 

 swimming larvae that would promenade the surface waters of the 

 North Sea for a little while before they changed their shapes into 

 the shape of a lobster and descended to the bottom where they 

 would take up their final residence. But the waters of the surface 

 were swimming with predators, each of which was much more 

 powerful than the baby lobster. Hundreds of the 'berries' would 

 bud into beasts that would survive for the merest mirage of a 

 lifetime. They would be consumed by such earnest hordes of 

 carnivores as the Arrow worm, the Salps, and the Herring, all 

 of them less valuable to a solitary fisherman than a solitary lobster. 

 Very few of a female lobster's eggs ever survived to become, in 

 their turn, the mothers and fathers of another season of eggs. If, 

 therefore, the fishermen were to destroy their potential prey at 

 the point of its greatest concentration, on the body of the 

 fertilised female, there would be every likelihood of the whole 

 species being totally exterminated. If not that, it might well 

 become so rare that a further fishery would be uneconomic and 

 unthinkable. It was for this reason, in order to protect the true 

 interests of lobstermen, that the Government introduced legis- 

 lation to forbid the landing of berried females. 



But the eggs of a pregnant lobster are attached to hairs on the 

 cuticle on the legs beneath her abdomen, so that they can easily 

 be scraped off by an enterprising fisherman. No sign remains. 

 The animal is clean, and can be sold at the normal price on the 

 normal market. As the intelligence of the Government's in- 

 tention spreads among the men in the boats, the immediacy of 

 their self-interest confronts them ever more clearly, and the odd 

 pound or two made off a 'brushed' lobster pales and dwindles 

 before the prospect of mass unemployment. But still, as Jan well 

 understood, there are the situations. There are the times when 

 the tangible temptation is too great for any prospect of future 

 earnings to interfere with their day's takings. And the worst of 

 it is that these situations are especially frequent when the catches 

 are small, when the population is low, when there is most need 



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