THE HERRING AND ITS KINDRED.
BY F. G. AFLALO, F.Z.S.
"King herring," as the trade-paper of the fishing industry rightly calls it, is one of the chief commercial fishes of the British seas, and the enormous North Sea herring fisheries probably support more boats and men from all parts than any other. Europe has no very large herring; but the Tarpon of the Mexican coast, as well as another giant which occurs in the northern waters of Australia, grows to an enormous size. All the members of the Herring Family feed and travel near the surface of the sea, and are therefore caught in drift-nets, miles of which are "shot" a few fathoms from the top of the water, catching the shoaling-fish in their meshes. All of them, too, are wanderers, most capricious in their goings and comings. Hence the uncertainty of the fisherman's wage.
The principal kinsmen of the herring in British seas are the Sprat and Pilchard, though the two kinds of Shad, which, like the salmon, ascend certain rivers for spawning purposes, also support a number fishermen; and the Anchovy is, authorities have lately suspected, sufficiently numerous on the British coasts to repay a regular fishery, if the men could be induced to try the experiment and use a sufficiently fine-meshed net for this little fish.
The Herring of the more northern waters is larger than that of the English Channel, 17 inches being recorded as its maximum size in the former, as against only 12¼ inches farther south. In the Baltic, however, the writer found the herrings still smaller than those of the English Channel. The herring lacks the lateral line, already alluded to in other fishes; its scales are large and thin; its under-edge is smooth and keeled; and the male is slightly the larger of the two sexes. The Sprat, on the other hand, is a smaller species. It has no teeth; its belly is saw-edged; its back-fin starts nearer the tail than that of the herring. The herring, moreover, differs from the sprat, and indeed from all our most important fishes, in that its eggs sink to the bottom. The eggs of almost all other sea-fish float at or near the surface of the sea, so that the herring's spawn alone can be damaged by the operations of the ground-sweeping trawl-net. The shad's eggs also sink to the bottom, but are deposited in the less buoyant waters of rivers.
Photo by W. Saville-Kent, F.Z.S.] [Milford-on-Sea.
OX-EYED HERRING.
This species attains a length of several feet.
The Pilchard, the all-important fish (together with mackerel) on the south-west coast of England, is of a more decided green hue than either of the foregoing. Its scales are large and coarse, and its back-fin starts closer to the head than in the rest. The pilchard of Cornwall and the sardine of the Mediterranean are one and the same fish in different stages of growth—that is to say, the pilchard is a grown-up sardine. The late Matthias Dunn of Mevagissey was one of the first practical fishermen to accept this identity, and the flourishing sardine factory at his native town bears lasting witness to his enterprise. Although, from the economic standpoint, we associate the pilchard with the extreme south-west of the English Channel, the fish finds its way to more eastern counties. The writer has found it at both Bournemouth and Ventnor; and it is taken, though sparsely, in the herring-nets of the North Sea fleets.