THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



239 



order. Pots of partly cooked food were 

 on the galley stove, charts and papers 

 were spread upon the cabin table, and 

 nothing was there to indicate how or 

 when or whither skipper and crew had 

 gone. He also tells of a derelict floating 

 keel up which was destroyed by a naval 

 ship. When the first shot was fired a 

 multitude of cats appeared out of the 

 hold. Prisoners of fate, they were the 

 descendants of the ship's cats and had 

 found imprisoned rats as prolific as them- 

 selves. 



Another matter of pressing moment 

 that seems destined to occupy a larger 

 place in oceanographic research after the 

 war is the question of sea food. The 

 great conflict has demonstrated how close 

 is the margin between food production 

 and food consumption, and how much 

 more pressing the food question is des- 

 tined to grow in the years of peace and 

 racial expansion that lie ahead. 



THE OCEANS' INEXHAUSTIBLE FOOD 

 RESERVOIRS 



The oceans literally teem with food. 

 The man who declared that humanity is 

 a race of herring-catchers might have 

 overstated the case, but that the sea 

 abounds in food-fishes and fishes fit for 

 food is well known. As soon as we begin 

 to study the subject of ocean fisheries, 

 however, we come up short against the 

 fact that what we really know about the 

 inhabitants of the sea is startlingly 

 limited. 



It was not so long ago that the fisher- 

 men of the North Sea believed that 

 whales brought the herring in toward 

 shallow water — a conclusion they reached 

 from the observation that schools of her- 

 ring are frequently found in the vicinity 

 of spouting whales. In 1906 there was a 

 failure of the herring fisheries, and the 

 fishermen blamed it on the Norwegian 

 whaling vessels operating in that region. 



Likewise, it is still a moot question 

 whether or not modern fishing methods 

 tend to deplete the supply, and whether 

 artificial propagation of sea fishes is a 

 sufficient counter-measure. A few years 

 ago a British commission measured the 

 intensity of fishing operations in the 

 North Sea. Trailing bottles were set 

 adrift, and it was found that more than 



half of them were recaptured. In certain 

 localities they were captured at a rate that 

 indicated 90 per cent retaken each sea- 

 son. Marked fish yielded largely similar 

 results, and the conclusion was that a 

 food-fish of adult size had at least three 

 to one odds against its getting through 

 the year uncaught. 



And yet there is so little race suicide 

 in the ocean that even such intensive fish- 

 ing probably has no effect upon the avail- 

 able adult supply. For instance, the fe- 

 male turbot lays 8,500,000 eggs a year, 

 and the cod has 4,500,000 to her credit. 

 The female flounder lays 1,400,000, the 

 sole 570,000, the haddock 450,000, and 

 the plaice 300,000. The poor herring 

 must be content with a meager 31,000. 



Much remains to be learned about the 

 migration habits of the world's food- 

 fishes. Where do the salmon go after 

 they leave the rivers? Why does the eel, 

 as discovered sometime since by the 

 Danes, go far out to sea, far to the south 

 and west of the Irish coast, to spawn, 

 and how do the countless hordes of deli- 

 cate elvers find their way around the Brit- 

 ish Isles and into the continental rivers? 

 Innumerable are the questions like these 

 that the future will reveal to the ocean- 

 ographers of a new day. 



The problem of life in the ocean is one 

 full of interest and pregnant with valu- 

 able lessons for mankind. Even at the 

 bottom of the deepest trench in the abys- 

 mal region of the sea's bottom, where no 

 ray of the sun ever penetrated, where 

 Stygian night is perpetual, where freez- 

 ing temperatures never cease and where 

 inconceivable pressures prevail, the mir- 

 acle of life still goes on. When you re- 

 member that the atmospheric pressure of 

 15 pounds per square inch means 30,000 

 pounds on a surface as large as an aver- 

 age sized man's body, and then consider 

 that in some of the deeper places in the 

 ocean the pressure is more than four tons 

 to the square inch, or eight million pounds 

 for a surface as large as a man's body, 

 you will naturally wonder how any living 

 thing can exist there. 



QUEER CREATURES OE THE SEA 



Yet eerie creatures do exist, even in 

 the uttermost depths. Here is a fish 

 swimming by with light-giving organs 



