Roundpsh 



more than likely that the sand eel too tried to protect its eggs by 

 burying them but it moved only to the shallow water, never to the 

 shore itself, and its spawning run was thus invisible to man and 

 therefore less spectacular and less well known . Whether it too obey- 

 ed a lunar periodicity Jan did not know and never could discover. 

 Whatever happened, the spawTiing system of the sand eel was effect- 

 ive. There were always plenty of Ammodjtes. There was always 

 food for the herring and the cod and the whiting. 



WHITING 



Much as most commercial species fed on these small fish, none 

 of the other gadoids were so devoted to them as the whiting. It 

 fed almost entirely on other fish, particularly pouts and sand eels. 

 Unlike the cod, it had a very delicate stomach, a stomach that 

 could never have survived the clav^^ing of a live crab. And it look- 

 ed like a hunter, like a fish built for the chase. It had no barbel, 

 and that was a hint that it did not trickle forwards across the bot- 

 tom feeling for life, for sedentary food. It probably depended on 

 its eyes. That is the way of hunters. They may sense food with 

 their nose or their ears but, when they come to close on their scurry- 

 ing prey, they usually rely upon their eyes to fix the image and mea- 

 sure the distance of the necessary leap . The whiting had good eyes 

 and it used them to hunt the swift glittering fish and the agile semi- 

 transparent invertebrates that burrow beside them in the sea floor. 

 That was surely the way of it, thought Jan. And his suspicions 

 were confirmed by a couple of glances at the whiting's streamlined 

 body. Gone was the clumsy fluttering of the haddock, gone too 

 the comfortable bourgeois paunch of the cod : a small peeked head 



