90 . THE COD 



Americans have worked out the following incubation table 

 for cod (cf. Manual of Fish Culture, p. 206) : 



They have found that thousands of eggs are, during this 

 period, washed ashore, and Bars noticed the same phenomenon 

 in Norway. It was found also that when the water temperature 

 falls below 38° F. the period of incubation is so long that the fry 

 are weak when they appear, and it is then very hard to hatch 

 out more than 25 to 50 per cent, of the eggs successfully. 

 Whether low temperature reduces the vitality of cod larvae 

 floating in the sea the writer does not know.^ But Hjort has 

 noticed that in 1901 and 1902 and 1903, when the Arctic ice- 

 field came far south off Norway, all fisheries suffered. 



The spawning season is from February to May, and the 

 spawning takes place generally in shallower water than that of 

 the haddock or coalfish, at 10 to 40 fathoms. Off Norway, 

 however, it is at 40 to 50 fathoms. The fry are carried into the 

 coastal shallows all round the North Sea, from the shore to the 

 40-fathom line, the Skagerrak, the Faeroe Banks, the Norse 

 fjords, the north and east coast of Iceland, and in the Arctic 

 Ocean. 



All round the North Sea the fry come inshore from | inch to 

 4 inches long in May, June, July, and August. In Norway 

 the eggs were always just over the spawning banks — and 

 nowhere else — in March and April, but by June the small fry 

 have scattered far away and outside of them, and in August 

 and September fry several inches long, which had apparently 

 come either from Eomsdal Bank or from the Lofotens in the 

 Norse Sea, were found floating over great depths one hundred 

 miles north of the nearest land. The fry go gradually to the 

 bottom (wherever they may be drifting at the time) soon after 

 their mouths begin to function.- Small one-year-old cod have 

 been caught at 40 fathoms in the Skagerrak, and at 150 fathoms 

 in the Arctic Ocean. In Iceland — our main fishing-ground — 



^ See also Hjort's Canadian investij2;ations. Below, p. 97. 

 2 In captivity fry take to mid-water at the end of their first week and tlien 

 go to the bottom. 



