290 FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY 



from a boat. Such beds, under some circumstances, are 

 liable to become overcrowded to such an extent that the 

 individual mussels have not room to grow to their full 

 size, and so become stunted or misshapen. In these cases 

 great benefit to the fishery results from thinning out and 

 transplanting to other suitable but less densely populated 

 locaHties. Plate XXVI, Fig. 1, shows an overcrowded 

 mussel-bed. 



The shellfish industries of the west coast of England 

 are of considerable importance, both as food and bait. 

 In recent years the returns in the Lancashire and Western 

 Sea-Fisheries District alone amounted to about two -fifths of 

 the total for England and Wales, and the value to the fisher- 

 men was about £40,000. There is probably no area of land 

 or water in our country that gives such a high return in 

 weight of food per acre as a mussel-bed, and the shellfish 

 are eminently responsive to cultivation and susceptible of 

 improvement. Here, at least, if not yet in the open sea, we 

 may have an aquiculture comparable to agriculture on land. 



In Morecambe Bay, some years ago, the local sea-fisheries 

 committee made a notable experiment ^ in order to show 

 the fishermen what could be done in this direction, by judi- 

 cious transplanting, at small cost. The work was carried 

 out on the mussel-beds at Heysham, in Morecambe Bay, 

 probably the most extensive mussel-producing grounds on 

 the west coast of England (see Plate XXVI, Fig. 1). 



In 1903 the committee gave a grant of £50 to be expended 

 on labour in transplanting overcrowded and stunted mussels, 

 which had ceased to grow, to neighbouring areas not so 

 thickly populated. The result was most striking. At the 

 end of a few months the old starved, undersized mussels — 

 " blue-nebs," as the fishermen called them — had grown 

 I inch or more, and had reached the legal selHng size. 

 The animals inside the shell were in fine condition, and these 



^ For the full details, see the article by Scott and Baxter in the 

 Lancashire Sea- Fisheries Laboratory Report for 1905. 



