CHAPTER III 



THE OKGANIZATION OF OCEAN EESEAKCH 



Ocean investigations are, most wisely, divided up among 

 the nations by the permanent International Council for the 

 Exploration of the Sea. The chairman for 1920 is the Head of 

 the Fisheries Division of the English Ministry of Agriculture, 

 and the Council met in London in 1920. The investigations 

 into the Hfe history of the chief staple fishes landed in this 

 country are at present apportioned as follows : 



Herrings to Norway. 



Cod, Haddock, and Codfish to Norway. 



Plaice to Great Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, and 

 Holland. 



Hake to France, with some assistance from British and Irish 

 research vessels. 



In succeeding chapters the writer has collected as much in- 

 formation as possible about researches into the habits of fish 

 which have actually been undertaken. He will here indicate 

 what he beHeves personally to be the key to the position, and 

 then comment on the work as a whole. As will appear in the 

 chapters on cod and haddock and herrings which follow, the 

 Norwegians have discovered that in certain years — notably in 

 1904 and 1912 — very abnormal numbers of these fishes survived 

 their babyhood and ' grew up '. So much so that in 1919 

 people were eating one lot of Norwegian herrings which were 

 fifteen years old, and another lot which were seven. In last 

 year's catches very few fish appeared which had been hatched 

 in the intervening years. The latter were ' bad (or perhaps 

 normal) spawning years ', and 1904 and 1912 were ' good (or 

 perhaps abnormal) spawning years '. These terms will be 

 explained in future chapters. ^ But it is necessary at the outset 

 to know that the discoveries are based on ' scale reading '. 

 Quite briefly this science ^ starts with the knowledge that fish 

 grow more slowly in winter than they do in summer ; the scales 

 grow as the fish grows ; they (Hke trees) make a good growth 

 in the summer which appears on the scale as a transparent 

 zone ; this is bounded by a narrow opaque ring which is (again 

 as in the case of a tree) formed in winter. A zone and a ring 



1 See below, pp. 85, 80, 94-90, and 107. 

 - See Depths of Ocean, pp. 769-05. 



