The Herring 



young fish annually, protected them, for example, from the thin 

 but rapacious transparency of the arrow worms that took such 

 heavy toll of juvenile gadoids. 



But where the mother herring laid her eggs was another ques- 

 tion and more difficult to answer. 'These herrings, ' wrote Camden 

 in the reign of Elizabeth, 'which in the times of our grandfathers 

 swarmed only about Norway, now in our times by the bounty of 

 Providence swim in great shoals round our coasts every year.' 

 And 'round our coasts' they had swum ever since. The term was 

 probably more accurate than Camden had intended for he was al- 

 most certainly unaware of the clockwise rotation of the herring 

 swarms round the eastern and southern coasts of the British Isles. 

 Beginning off Shetland in May and June, July and early August 

 found the herring in Buchan waters, then south past the Forth to 

 reappear on the rich East Anglian grounds for the autumn season : 

 they were near the Isle of Wight by December and had reached 

 Cornwall for the beginning of the New Year. And then the spring 

 season began on the western coast of Scotland : and so back to 

 Lerwick, another May and June. As this pattern had clarified out 

 of the observations of thousands of fishermen, many of them began 

 to fear that the herring would be vastly over- fished. It would have 

 been all very well for the Lerwick men or the East Anglian men to 

 have a good season's take but if they both caught their thousands 

 of tons, and the Shields men, the Stornoway men, the Plymouth, 

 Ullapool and Peterhead men, were all also fishing out miles of net 

 meshed hard with the herring glint, then it seemed obvious that 

 there would soon be no more fish for anybody. No single popula- 

 tion could be expected to support half a dozen industries in this 

 manner. But, when the scientists investigated these herring 

 movements, they dispelled the fears of the fishermen by discover- 

 ing that the various industries were concerned with different pop- 

 ulations, populations that were bionomically as separate from one 

 another as haddock was separate from plaice, populations that did 

 not interbreed, that did not frequent the same grounds, that diff- 

 ered from one another anatomically and behaviouristically. But 



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