CHAPTER VTIT 



TEANSPLANTATION AS A EEMEDY 



First Suggestion published by the Industnj, 1894 



On the 22nd May 1894 Mr. K. Douglas, a Grimsby steam- 

 trawl skipper, read a paper before the National Sea Fisheries 

 Protection Association. His argument was as follows. Large 

 quantities of plaice, 8 to 10 inches long, were to be had on the 

 Dutch, German, and Danish coasts in the summer months. He 

 had observed that plaice caught fifteen to twenty-five miles off 

 shore from these grounds were, on the average, much larger, 

 and, in many instances, had arrived at maturity, i. e. were 

 15 to 17 inches long. He advocated the building of a special 

 steamer with ' wells ' to contain 30,000 live plaice of 8 to 

 10 inches. She would fish the small fish-grounds with light 

 gear, hauling her trawl once every hour so as to avoid killing 

 the young plaice, and would fill her wells with live fish in two 

 or three days. She could make six trips a month, which would 

 give her 1,080,000 small plaice in a season of six months. She 

 would turn her young fish adrift on the Dogger Bank, the 

 Leman Banks, and on other grounds ' close in to our own 

 shores '. In choosing grounds to which to transplant his fish 

 he gave preference to places in which steam-trawling was not so 

 intensive as to destroy them before they had grown. Thus on 

 the Dogger ' there is plenty of ground that is not worth working, 

 because it has been fished clean long ago '. On the Leman, ' in 

 the winter months, as a general rule, we have not many vessels 

 that fish there, and when these fish are set adrift near some 

 parts of our shores, they will have to go, in some cases, twenty 

 miles before they are likely to be caught, as there is not much 

 trawling done within this distance.' 



He assumed that one-third of the fish thus transplanted 

 would be caught during the first summer, one-third in the 

 second year, and one-third in the third year. Allowing for 

 growth, he calculated that the effect would be as follows : 



£ 



First year: 360,000 plaice at 150 to the box' =2,400 boxes sold at 



lO.s. per box 1,200 



Second year : 3f)0,000 plaice at 75 to the box =4,800 boxes sold at 



£1 per box 4,800 



Third year: 300,000 plaice at 50 to the box =7,200 boxes sold at 



£1 56'. 0(^. per box 9,000 



Final value of transplanted fish ....... 15,000 



' A box is approximately 80 lb. 



