Living Silver 



silently like fish-shaped flakes, that a strong current would have 

 shaped them into a blizzard of glistening flesh. And, in spite of 

 this vast thick snowfall, Jan first read of G. esmarkii in one of the 

 standard text-books of local ichthyology where it was listed as 

 'rare'. Only in the very recent past, by attaching a small-mesh 

 cover to the cod-end of their trawls have the scientists been able 

 to establish its marvellous abundance, though they have known of 

 it for some time, chiefly from specimens rescued from the stom- 

 achs of haddock, cod, whiting and turbot. It was lucky for them 

 that this little pout was a gadoid. That fact told them a great deal 

 about its biology, for the biological resemblances between these 

 marine groups is much greater than the merely anatomical. Then 

 too, it had no barbel and, indeed, it looked a good deal like a 

 small whiting, except that it was somewhat stumpier and its scales 

 seemed proportionately larger and they glistened more. The for- 

 ward thrust of the lower jaw demonstrated clearly that it was not 

 a bottom feeder though it did have its full share of the gadoid vora- 

 city. 



Another small gadoid was the Poor Cod, Gadus minutus. Com- 

 pletely unlike the pout, its globular pink body also shone, but 

 clumsily, a brand new piggy bank at large over Dogger. When it 

 swam, it was as though it moved under sail and was not a real fish 

 swimming. A longish barbel dangled from its lower jaw and its 

 eyes tended to bulge in ostentatious innocence when it was brought 

 to the surface. Apart from those few observations, there was 

 very little known about it, perhaps even less than in the case of 

 G. esmarkii. It was certain, however, that there were times when 

 the bigger commercial species fed on it with a persistence that 

 testified to its prolific abundance. 



But, though both these little fellows were important as food for 

 human food, there was no fish equal to the sand eel when it came 

 to furnishing a storehouse for the catches of the North Sea. Jan 

 finally reached the conclusion that everything that lives there lives 

 on a diet of Ammodytes. Even the sand eels themselves fed on 

 their young or on the smaller species of sand eels, fed predomin- 



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