THE TUEBOT AND TUEBOT CULTUEE 69 



were weaned suddenly. Dr. Anthony's fry — thanks to his early 

 feeding — came through to the eighteenth or twentieth day, by 

 which time they were quite hardy and able to look after them- 

 selves, with a loss of only 10 per cent. 



Any one who is famihar with the Ehode Island State Lobster 

 Hatchery at Wickford will recognize that Dr. Mead and 

 Mr. Barnes and their colleagues have merely apphed on a big 

 scale the principle which Dr. Anthony has worked out in the 

 St. Vaast laboratory. In place of glass barrels they have floating 

 boxes 10 feet square ; in place of the revolving disk a 4J-foot 

 propeller ; in place of the little hot-air motor, a full-blown 

 petrol engine. But the principles are identical — constant 

 motion of the water ; careful feeding with floating food. 



If by the Wickford or any other method turbot larvae in 

 captivity can be ensured a good circulation of water, and if 

 a suitable form of ' infant's food ' to supplement that in the yolk- 

 sac can be found, there is httle doubt that Dr. Anthony will 

 be the founder of modern turbot cultufe on a big scale. 

 Dr. Anthony is confident of devising an apparatus and a method 

 of feeding ; and, as he says, the turbot is such a valuable and 

 such a hardy fish that it will almost certainly repay cultivation. 

 Dr. Anthony's paper suggests one cause which may contribute 

 to the wholesale catastrophes which seem to overtake broods 

 of marine fishes in particular years. Young turbot must find 

 natural jood very soon after hatching, and Dr. Lebour finds that 

 they probably prefer copepods like Temora and Calanus and the 

 free-swimming larvae of barnacles to all other food. Normally 

 they spend this period near the surface from the 1st July to 

 the 15th September, a season of the year when, on the French 

 coast of the channel, storms are rare and the plankton is undis- 

 turbed. What would be the effect of a week or two of really 

 bad weather, with the water heavily charged with ooze and 

 sand, on the shallows ? Would it mean that planktonic life was 

 driven to mid water and that the little turbot at the surface 

 would be short of rations — and could similar results follow in 

 the case of other species from similar changes in weather or 

 temperature ? The writer offers no answer. The answer 

 depends on a knowledge of, for instance, the Hfe-history of the 

 copepod Calanus (which is at once the favourite food of the 

 baby turbot one-tenth of an inch long and of the seventy-foot 

 finner whale) — knowledge which the writer does not possess.^ 

 But he can say that a trawler or whaler captain who actually 

 saw a scientist engaged in working out the biology of Calanus 

 or studying with a microscope one of the plants on which 



1 But see below, pp. 193, 194. 



