The Herring 



members of both species spawned amiually from the age of three 

 or four and the herring, although it never grew to be large, could 

 live for up to twenty years. But, since it was attacked from land, 

 sea and air, by men, fish and birds, no herring could count on any 

 such grandfatherly ripening. What was to be wondered at was the 

 fact that so many attained sexual maturity at all. Though man 

 preyed on the herring more intensively than on any other marine 

 creature, he calculated that his endeavours accounted for only a 

 twentieth of the annual slaughter of the species. His avian and 

 cetacean competitors were responsible for more deaths than he. 

 The first and most important reason for its abundance could 

 have been easily deciphered by a biologist from the very fact that, 

 for a deep-sea fish, the herring laid so few eggs. A female cod 

 needed to spawn by the million because she had no afterthought 

 for the safety of her offspring. She, was, in fact, quite liable to 

 eat them. A mammal, on the other hand, who suckled her child- 

 ren, could support a population by bringing two live young into 

 the world. Between these extremities of maternal neglect there 

 lay a series of infinitesimally small gradations. Any animal could 

 be fitted into one rung of this ladder, but the value of its position 

 varied from environment to environment. It varied in a biological 

 fashion rather than a moral one. A human mother who deposited 

 her new-born offspring on the steps of the town hall at seven- 

 thirty of a June morning would have been regarded, biologically, as 

 impeccable. She had eliminated all possibility that her child would 

 die. The care of a cod took a different form. She laid enough eggs 

 to make certain that some of them survived after birth. Of 

 six million, surely two individuals would escape. And, from the 

 point of view of the biologist, her attitude appeared perfectly 

 tenable. But, whether it was the primitive mother-instinct drag- 

 ging at her ovaries or a simple physiological laziness that kept her 

 from manufacturing such myriads of eggs, the herring, like her 

 cousin the salmon, chose a compromise, a compromise that some- 

 times exposed her to almost as certain and immediate a death as 

 that which follows the salmon's spawning run. 



.87 



