74 DAHLAK 



Exploding a bomb under water as a means of killing fish is 

 certainly no innovation. It is in fact the stock-in-trade of 

 certain unscrupulous characters whose fishing is done on the 

 wrong side of the law. It was new, however, in relation to 

 research and scientific collection. 



Before trying it out and adopting it as a method of work, 

 we carefully examined our consciences. The first thing we 

 asked ourselves was, did the laws of Eritrea permit it? The 

 answer to this was yes, because there was no legislation on the 

 matter. Was it hkely to entail serious ichthyological or bio- 

 logical damage? No, for the dead fish that remained, un- 

 wanted by us after we had collected all the specimens we 

 needed, went to feed the larger species, sharks, breams and 

 tunny, and so helped to re-establish the biological merry-go- 

 round. The destruction of eggs and young, doubtless fairly 

 heavy within the radius of the explosion (restricted however 

 to two or three square yards at the most, as we took every 

 precaution to throw very small 'bombs', just sufficient to 

 serve our purpose), was nothing in relation to the indescrib- 

 able richness of the fauna in that sea ; ten hydrogen bombs in 

 the Red Sea would not perceptibly diminish its fauna. And 

 lastly, were we causing unnecessary deaths? No, indeed we 

 were not, as before each throw we took pains to ascertain 

 that it was absolutely essential, and that we could not pos- 

 sibly dispense with it. Certain small and very small fish (those 

 of a few millimetres in length), many of which were rare or 

 even unknown to science, could be caught in no other way, 

 thus necessitating the sacrifice of the less interesting or more 

 common ones. 



We threw about fifteen 'bombs' in all, and it was these 

 that gave us our largest number of rare and valuable fish. 

 We made the bombs ourselves by sticking a very short fuse 

 with detonator into a piece of explosive gelatine. We took 



