Roundfish 



antly on them, not just occasionally as is the cannibalistic habit of 

 the cod. The herring ate Ammodvtes larvae. The whiting, the 

 cod, the plaice, the dabs, the turbot, the saithe, the haddock, 

 everything fed on sand eels and, often, on nothing but sand eels. 

 And yet there were always more. 



How the monstrous abundance of this larder was maintained, 

 where the sand eels lived when they were not shoaling to breed, 

 what their pattern of behaviour consisted of, all these questions 

 remained subject to contradictory conjectures. It had not even 

 been established whether there were three or four or five species 

 of them in the home waters of Britain. Only one thing was cer- 

 tain : that most of the commercial fish would have starved if the 

 Ammodjtes populations had suddenly disappeared. They were the 

 key link in the marine food chain that joined sunlight to man. 

 They were the animals who changed the tiny invertebrates of the 

 sea into protein that was acceptable to white fish, and the white 

 fish were served at the dinner table. The herring could, indeed, 

 compete with them. But the herring itself lived largely on sand 

 eel babies. 



And yet they were there. Everything ate them and yet they 

 were there. And in such force that a single square metre of sea- 

 bed might provide a home for more than a hundred of them. No 

 amount of depredation affected their abundance. Yet the cod laid 

 six million eggs and the sand eel not more than thirty thousand. 

 It all seemed impossible. 



Jan found that there were at least three species, all of them 

 spawning at different times, so that the dense spawning shoals 

 were seldom absent from the shallow waters around the coasts. 

 It was on these shoals that the white fish fed. Not only on them 

 but, when they were about, they fed on nothing but them. For 

 the shoals were vulnerable to any kind of attack, and they were 

 attacked by almost everything that could swim. An old and ill- 

 used dab, with its tail in tatters from a recent escape from the 

 trawl, its body emaciated by months of starvation, its skin blot- 

 ched with parasitic fungi, even such a wreck of a fish could catch 



83 



