Living Silver 



what people ate. And the tiny pouch that contained the intestines 

 of the fish seemed too small to Jan. It simply could not absorb 

 enough food to supply energy to these massive wings. That, again, 

 was like a flatfish. Their guts too were excessively small, the body 

 cavity reduced to a hollow on the ventral side of the forward 

 quarter of the animal. But it only served to remind Jan of the 

 chief difference between flatfish and skates, a difference that struck 

 him as even more important than such basic anatomical ones as 

 the absence of bone and the presence of spiracles. It was the 

 difference in orientation. 



Top and bottom, back and belly, they were all meaningless 

 terms when applied to flatfish like the pleuronectidae. Because 

 their larvae went through that strange metamorphosis transferring 

 both eyes to the same side of the head and thus allowing the fish 

 to lie on its left side in the case of the plaice, halibut and sole, on 

 its right in the turbot and megrim, there was no strict telling what 

 was the back and what was the belly. With the skates, however, 

 there was no doubt whatever. They were orientated like dogfish, 

 dogfish that had swnjm through a tight powerful mangle and had 

 been depressed. The more forward of the side fins had then 

 been inflated, had grown out of all proportion, and thorny spines 

 had appeared on the back and tail, but there had been no develop- 

 mental change in the structural organisation of muscle to cartilage 

 and nerve to brain as had happened in the true flatfish. 



As usual, the real affinities of the skate were shown in its 

 methods of reproduction. Like the sharks they copulated and 

 bore few young. Four or five eggs in a year was probably as much 

 as they ever produced but these eggs usually survived. They did 

 not have to float high in the plankton, natural fodder for any pas- 

 sing carnivore. They did not lie in dense concentration of the sea- 

 bottom, attracting whole shoals of voracious haddock. They were 

 not small unprotected things, vulnerable to the first hypha of an 

 insatiable silent fungus. No, the eggs of skate were big and comp- 

 licated, bigger even than those of the dogfish. They were bulging 

 oblongs of dark brown horn, each corner extending into a thin 



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