OCEAN CASUALTIES

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 211, 7 September 1933, Page 6

OCEAN CASUALTIES

The ways of fish and the mishaps that come to them in the sea have always been a source of perplexity to men, and the report that millions of dead shrimps and small fish have been cast on the beach at Hoylalce is only one more addition to the list of marine misadventures for which there is no adequate explanation (says a writer in the "Manchester Guardian"). In the autumn bi. ,11925,- when the Scottish fishermen were getting ready for the great trek to Yarmouth, they reported a shortage of 300,000 crans of,herrings on the previous year's fishing. On an average a cran represents 750 herrings, so that 300,000 erans work out at 225,000,000 of fish. What happened to all those herrings that failed to appear at the accustomed places and times? There was no answer, and only a speculation that perhaps unfavourable winds and currents at' spawning time had caught the helpless frv and carried them off to unsuitable regions of* the sea where they had perished in myriads. A year earlier the beaches of Walfish Bay we/'e strewn with dead fish that were believed to have been the victims of some submarine upheaval. They lay in masses all along the tidal marks, in places to the depth of over a foot, and it was estimated that over 500,000 tons of fish had perished. But the most spectacular case of widespread fish destruction occurred in 1882, when captains of vessels arriving at harbours along the Atlantic seaboard reported that they had sailed through areas of dead or dying fish extending for forty, fifty and sixty miles. The captain of the schooner Navarino affirmed that he had sailed his ship for 160 miles through waters covered "from horizon to horizon" with dead fish. The majority of the victims were tilefish, a gorgeously coloured ■ and edible creature, the first catch of wliich had been reported only three years previously. Several theories-were advanced to account for this wholesale massacre, and in the absence of disease or deadly parasites, and with no indication of a isubmarine-disturbance, the explanation generally accepted was that a sudden lowering of the temperature of the Gulf Stream was the most probable cause. At any rate, the tilefish was scheduled at Washington Museum among "Animals recently extinct," although a few specimens were caught I ten years later.