THE HERRING FAMILY 



spawning or ripe sprats could be captured. But it happens that 

 the longshore fishermen who capture sprats do not fish in the 

 open sea, and the deep-sea fishermen do not use nets which are 

 capable of catching sprats. 



When the reproduction of the sprat was first considered, it 

 was naturally supposed that its mode of spawning would probably 

 prove to be closely similar to that of the herring. In 1884 Mr. 

 Duncan Matthews wrote that he obtained sprats with full roes 

 and milt from the coast of Scotland only in May and June, and 

 that many were so ripe that the roe could be readily expressed 

 by the hand, when it presented much the same appearance as 

 the spawn of the herring under similar circumstances. He gave 

 a figure of the spawn pressed out in the form of a string of eggs 

 lying on a glass plate. In the same year I published a descrip- 

 tion of a pelagic or buoyant fish-egg, the parent of which was 

 unknown. This egg was obtained by me in the Firth of Forth 

 in May and June, and it has since been proved that it is 

 the egg of the sprat. The same egg was described about the 

 same time by Victor Hensen from the Baltic, and that observer 

 first suggested that it belonged to the sprat, an identification which 

 he afterwards proved to be correct by pressing the eggs from a 

 perfectly ripe sprat. I have myself been able to confirm the 

 identification by examining eggs pressed from ripe sprats at 

 Plymouth. On board a trawler on February I2th, when the net 

 was hauled after being towed from Looe in Cornwall to a point 

 about five miles from Plymouth Breakwater, I found two sprats 

 amongst the fish caught. One of these was a perfectly ripe 

 female, and I pressed out a number of eggs, which floated in the 

 sea-water, and which were taken ashore and carefully examined 

 with the microscope. They were not fertilised, but they showed 

 the peculiarities so well known in the egg taken by the tow-net 

 from the sea. 



The spawning period of the sprat is prolonged ; the eggs are 

 found at Plymouth from the end of January until the end of 

 April or even later ; at St. Andrews they have been taken from 

 April to July, and on the west of Ireland they were observed 

 in March, April, May, and June. 



The egg of the sprat (Fig. 86) is from -94 to 1*2 mm. in 

 diameter (a little more or less than ^ T inch). It is to be 

 recognised by the division of the yolk into separate portions, 



