80 THE HADDOCK PROBLEM 



in winter. Russell finds that from their second summer the 

 fish move into shallow water in summer and out into deep 

 water in winter. 



This compilation is no doubt incomplete, but it indicates 

 that the life-history of the haddock has not yet been described 

 in English works on the Fisheries intended for non-expert 

 consumption. There is room for serious and adequate research, 

 which will be all the more difficult in that it is by no means 

 always easy to determine the age of a North Sea haddock 

 from its scales. A narrow zone sometimes appears in the 

 scales during the summer months which makes scale reading 

 very difficult. 



The Decline in the Catch 



Dr. Jenkins {The Sea Fisheries, p. 92) shows that between 

 1906 and 1913 there was a serious ' decline ' not only in North 

 Sea haddock but in the total yield of the haddock fishing- 

 grounds accessible to English fishing-vessels. The decline was 

 fairly steady, as the following table shows : 



But the following detailed table indicates that, on all the 

 haddock grounds, the catch can show perceptible recoveries in 

 particular years. 



As a fact the statistics, if reduced to a graph, do not show 

 quite a continuous decline on any of the grounds ; and eight 

 years is a very short period on which to found definite con- 

 clusions. It is impossible to study the figures without realizing 

 that ' good or bad spawning years ' may have affected the 

 catches at least as much as ' over-fishing '. Garstang, while 

 carrying out his experiment in transplantation in 1905, noticed 

 an extraordinary abundance of small ^ haddock and whiting 

 on the Dogger Bank. There were so many, and they consumed 

 the food of the young plaice to such an extent, that the latter 

 grew much more slowly in 1905 than in 1904 or 1906. Perhaps 

 the heavy North Sea catches in 1906 and 1907 simply reflected 

 that abundance ? If so the ' dechne ' would probably appear 

 less steep than it does at first sight, if the period of observation 



1 In 1897 the catch was 127,445 tons {Resources of the Sea, p. 269). 



2 Belonging to the 1904 brood which was so proHfic in Norway. 



