Living Silver 



of a dogfish lay on its ventral side and there were always a good 

 two inches of snout tapering ahead of it before the soft whiteness 

 of the skin on the underside gave way to the smoky blackness of 

 the dorsal hide. In this it was just like the skate. Both of them 

 had mouths far back on their bellies so that neither could attack 

 anything that was swimming above them. They had to get on top 

 of their prey and all the subtleties of their hunting techniques 

 were calculated to make sure that they did so. The dogfish swam 

 above the shoals they were going to attack. The skates lived on 

 the bottom, feeding only on animals that never left the ground, 

 that could never get above the hard lumpy teeth at the border of 

 each of the skate's lips. 



It was the back of the skate that had put Jan off the scent of its 

 real affinities. It was a mottled variegated back, like the back of a 

 halibut or a plaice. Usually the colour was a dull browii but that 

 was just a background colour. All kinds of shade and tinges, in- 

 tense patchworks of white, little splashes of black, cones and 

 spirals of orange and yellow, and mellow mixtures of so many 

 diverse tones that it was impossible to name them as any single 

 colour. This too, as in the flatfish, meant camouflage, the best, 

 form of protection for a sluggish animal that lives imbedded in 

 mud. But the skates were even more careful about possible pre- 

 dators than the pleuronectidae. They did not rely totally on in- 

 visibility. Almost all of them were garbed in an irregular pattern 

 of thorn-shaped spines, scales that had been modified into sharp 

 horny projections, large and strong enough to scrape through the 

 callouses of even an ancient deckie and draw blood. Young skates, 

 in particular, tended to glue their bellies to the deck and arch up 

 their backs so that they became almost like the spiny balls of a 

 hedgehog under attack. On the back, too, were the eyes and the 

 twin openings of the spiracles, highly modified circular gill-slits 

 that were not present among the bony fish. In the skate they were 

 larger than in the case of the dogfish and more important to the 

 life of the animal. It was doubtful, indeed, if the dogfish had any 

 use for its spiracles but, for the skates, they were breathing tubes. 



128 



