The mighty deep

A WORLD abundantly peopled. A world which holds its myriads, uncountable in kinds, beyond reckoning in numbers.

No part of the wide Ocean may be found where fishes are not, and in places, at seasons, the water positively teems with them, so that they may be said almost to hustle one another for want of space. Fishes, taken by themselves, letting alone jelly-inhabitants and shell-inhabitants and crab-inhabitants, would suffice to keep the whole sea alive.

No picture of the Great Deep would be, even in the humblest sense, complete without some little description of the world of Fish-life contained therein.

But the subject is one of hopeless magnitude to be dealt with in a couple of short chapters.

A mere list of the names and chief characteristics of the principal “Orders” of Fishes, putting on one side the immense array of “sub-orders” and “varieties,” would speedily outrun the limits of these pages. Besides, such a list would be to the ordinary reader unreadable. Natural History savants have not troubled themselves to curtail syllables in titles so used.

On land we have beasts and birds, which serve as food for man; beasts and birds of prey; beasts and birds that are simply harmless, attractive, pretty, or interesting.

In the Ocean also we find fishes good for food; fishes of prey; fishes which may be classed as merely pretty, or curious, or remarkable.

This rough classification will do well enough for our present purpose. Many fishes belong of course to more than one of the divisions. That which is good for food may be also curious. That which acts as an ocean “beast of prey” may be also beautiful.

The speed with which fishes can dart along is often very great. Both fins and tails are used as a means of advance; and the smooth scale-clothed skin glides with the least possible friction through the water. No better form than the “boat-shaped” outline could be devised for rapid progress in a heavy element.

Not only are fishes light in make, often weighing hardly more than the water which upholds them; but also, unlike most backboned animals, they are cold-blooded. A few deep-sea kinds have no eyes, though commonly they can see and hear and smell well.

In the sense of feeling they are believed to be very deficient, and it is doubtful whether they suffer any pain at all, in the true sense of the word. Probably they can be conscious of discomfort.

One of their unfailing characteristics is the possession of a stupendous appetite, and with it of a superlatively good digestion. They live to eat; and they are at it incessantly. Perhaps in their case it does not always mean greediness, but only a due satisfying of Nature’s needs.

Certainly, as a race, they are not troubled with daintiness; and if they love variety of fare, they can have the same with ease. Pretty much whatever comes in their path is gulped down without hesitation—“gobbled up in the twink of an eye.” Most of them, in cannibalistic style, feed without compunction upon other fishes.

While they may be popularly said to “breathe water,” because they take in water instead of air, they depend upon life-sustaining oxygen every whit as much as do land animals, only in a different mode.

Large quantities of oxygen are ever present, dissolved, in the sea. It is not the water flowing through the fish’s gills, but the oxygen dissolved in that water, which carries on combustion in the body, and so keeps it in life and health.

The amount of oxygen thus obtained is small; therefore the combustion is slow; therefore the blood is cold. But if, for a very short time, all oxygen could be withdrawn from the ocean, the whole multitude of fishes therein would fast die of suffocation. Sea-water alone, without oxygen, could not keep them alive.

The gills are, however, so constructed that, while they can use small supplies of oxygen dissolved in water, they cannot use large supplies of oxygen forming part of the free air. So when a fish out of water draws in atmospheric air, its gills become dry and useless, and it dies of suffocation.

A world of rapid living and dying is this which we have now in view—of killing and being killed—of an incessant struggle for existence.

Many of its inhabitants have no means of defence, save by flight; and these feed only on beings weaker than themselves; largely on the vast hordes of the young of crabs and jelly-fishes. Others are furnished with formidable weapons, wherewith they can actively attack powerful foes.

Cold-blooded though they be, and probably without the sense of physical pain, they yet have their little range of emotions.

According to one thoughtful and competent observer,[10] they can be frightened, they can be angry, they can endure pangs of jealousy, they can be excited by a spirit of curiosity. And though one may perhaps hardly go so far as to speak of “fishy” affection, shown by one to another, yet some faint reflection of maternal anxiety seems occasionally to exist.

They also display a real enjoyment of life, a pleasure in “being,” a delight in playing with water and wave, and even a sportiveness, such as one might imagine to belong only to creatures of a higher grade.

On the whole, the brain of a fish is better developed than the brains of any other animals of low rank, excepting only that of the Cuttlefish.

Some instances have been known of tame fishes recognising, or seeming to recognise, human beings. It is open to doubt how far the “recognition” meant more than an expectation of something to eat, following upon certain familiar sounds.

Fishes good for food—these are and have been through ages by far the most important to man. Other kinds may be dangerous or interesting. But without the “Food-fishes” of the Ocean the difficulties of feeding mankind would be largely increased.

For they are always there. They come without exertion on our part. No sowing, no digging, no tending of the waters, is needed to bring forth the mighty harvest. Year after year, multitudes past imagination come into existence, and any number of them may be had for the trouble of taking.

All that man did in the past was his level best, by reckless destruction, to kill the goose which lays the golden eggs, to exterminate the creatures which are to him of so incalculable a value.

Of late years some steps have been taken in the other direction, some efforts have been made towards the preservation of fish and the culture of spawn. But much more remains to be done. The incessant use of line and net and trawl through centuries has thinned the multitudes of some species very greatly, and in the course of time they may even cease to exist.

That the harm done thus far has not been far greater must be ascribed to the enormous numbers of each kind, and to the vastness of those ocean-regions, where they may at any time retreat beyond man’s reach. For this we have to be thankful. It would be an ill day for us, on which the chief food-fishes should fail.

Herrings, for example. What would the poorer throngs of our large cities do, without that useful little cheap dish?

The amount of herrings caught yearly around British shores almost exceeds belief. They appear often in mighty shoals, swimming closely packed throughout a mile or more, being devoured as they swim, to the tune of millions, and being captured by fishermen in masses.

Yet year by year the supply goes on, apparently undiminished.

One fisherman alone, at work near the French coast, reckoned that in the course of a single night he had taken over five hundred thousand herrings, half which he threw back into the sea. An unusual amount, of course. But what must be the sum-total captured in a year by the combined efforts of all fishermen?

In a year, however, a herring produces somewhere about thirty thousand eggs. What, then, must be the sum-total of eggs produced by all herrings in the ocean?

True, vast numbers of the eggs come to nothing; vast numbers serve as food for other creatures. Yet enormous supplies escape countless dangers, and succeed. Thus the poor man’s food is bountifully given, in an ever-recurring harvest.

Among “Food-fishes” the “White” kinds are prominent, belonging mainly to two large families. One of these families includes Cod, Whiting, and Haddock. The other consists of Flat Fishes, such as Turbot, Halibut, Sole, Dab, Plaice.

At the head of the first family stands the Cod, that most useful and abundant creature, found throughout the deeper waters of northern seas.

During particular seasons the multitudes of cod are accompanied by multitudes of cuttlefishes—rather singularly, since cuttlefish are the favourite food of cod. But perhaps it would be more correct to say that the cuttlefish are accompanied by the cod—the latter doubtless going where they can find the food that they like. At these seasons millions of cuttlefish are caught, to be used as bait, by means of which enormous supplies of cod are taken for the market.

A calculation has been made that, in the course of a single spring, on the banks not far from Newfoundland, something like one hundred and twenty millions of cod are the result of combined British and American and French exertions.

Happily, this fish also is very prolific. An individual often produces three or four millions of eggs in a season; and as many as eight millions have been found on one fish. Here, again, immense numbers of the eggs fail to develop, immense numbers are devoured. Yet multitudes come to perfection, and the ocean is still furnished with cod.

There is, however, a very serious danger, beginning to be recognised, in the case of cod and yet more of some other “white-fish” kinds; and this is that in time the reckless havoc worked may outrun even these wonderful sources of renewal. Fishing has been carried on in the past, without thought for the future. Little or no attention has been paid to sparing the young; and the valuable roe itself has been used as an article of food. Man may by-and-by have to pay dearly for his lack of foresight and common-sense.

As an illustration of the numbers of fishes in the sea, a curious tale is told about a deep-water kind of Mullet, known as the Tile-fish.

This particular species had not been discovered before the year 1879. A few specimens were then taken from over a bank about eighty miles from the coast of Massachusetts—large and brightly coloured. Near that bank, where they had made their home, they could at any time be easily caught.

But in the spring of 1882 a heavy gale took place; after which these fishes were seen in enormous quantities, floating at the surface of the water, covering a space of three hundred miles in length and fifty in breadth. One who saw the singular sight reckoned that something like fourteen hundred millions of them must have been there—enough to have supplied every man and woman and child in the United States with between two and three hundred pounds’ weight of fish.

In the following autumn, when fishermen went again to the bank for tile-fish, they found none. Not a single specimen turned up. The storm, probably by shifting the direction of the Gulf-stream and its “cold wall,” had either destroyed them all, or had slain so many as to frighten the survivors to a distance. In that particular district they had not, when the story was written, been seen again.