Stop playing God with sea’s bounty

THE inner section of Dun Aengus Dock, in Galway city centre, was often as packed as a giant sardine tin with sprat and mackerel during the last two weeks of October.

Sprat, driven down the channel that forms the leg of the ‘T’ connecting the inner, wet dock with Galway Bay, found their escape route blocked by the predatory mackerel behind them. Reaching the head of the ‘T’, they veered left and then left again into a side channel that leads back towards the sea but is, in fact, an enclosed dock shaped like a sardine tin. Filled with fish, it provided a feast for birds, seals and human kind. It was, of course, we humans that took the major bounty. Ingeniously, we mechanised the harvesting of the bonanza.

At times, sprat driven from the water by the voracious mackerel silvered the dock-side steps and jetties with their scales. A few seals lolled in the midst of the sprat soup, while others swam in the ‘T’ of the dock and outside the gates, closed at low tide to maintain water levels within. The ‘sardine tin’ of trapped fish was overlooked by roads, apartment blocks, businesses and private homes, allowing a unique marine phenomenon to be viewed in the very centre of Galway city.

A spectacular sight, it was, the surface black with sprat, then flashing in the depths as the huge shoals turned, and the sky was loud with the high-pitched screaming of gulls.

Impressive was the fecundity of Galway Bay in October and it would seem to reassure those who worry about the decline in fish stocks. But the story continues. Even as the mackerel made hay, the seals stuffed themselves and the gulls gorged, local fisherman tried various inventive methods to avail themselves of the opportunity.

First attempts employed a derrick fixed to the back of a flatbed truck – perhaps superannuated from lifting blocks around a building site – to which was attached a circular net that was dropped into the water. When full of sprat, it was lifted and emptied into the capacious rear of a huge articulated lorry parked on the wharf nearby.

After a couple of days of experiments, this method was refined and a new system employed when a fresh, especially large sprat shoal arrived on the tide and crammed the dock. As the channel was too narrow for big boats to operate, a rowboat was used to lay nets down one side, around the back and up the other. The ends were slowly drawn together by two fishing boats using an improvised pair-trawl system.

Pulled tight in a ‘sack’, the overflowing net was manoeuvred by one of the boats to the dockside, where it was lifted higher in the water and opened. The derrick then dropped the relatively small, circular net into it to scoop up the fish and deposit them into the back of the arctic.

A heron was seen to stand on the growing pile at night; it perhaps found reassurance in the small mountain of suppers beneath its feet. It took days to fill the enormous artic.; meanwhile, the environs began to smell like the fish-palaces of old, but the locals, sympathetic to the fishermen, did not complain. The Claddagh, traditionally the fisherman’s quarter of the city, is only a hop and a skip – or a few tacks of a hooker – away.

I am told that the sprat were destined for a Donegal fish meal plant. Fish meal is, largely, used to feed farmed fish, but the Feed Conversion Ratio is unsatisfactory, requiring up to five kilos of meal to produce one kilo of farmed fish. When meal is made from fish ‘waste’, the bones and discarded organs of fish used for human consumption, this takes no toll on the health of the ocean, but it does when it is composed of harvested live fish, such as sprat.

While I applaud artisan fishermen striving to maintain their livelihood, it is sad to see the natural nutritional value of these fruits of the sea misspent in feeding farmed fish for the luxury market. However, our selfish appetites demand fat, pink salmon on the plate rather than ‘lowly’ sprat, a fine, oily fish, every bit as healthy as salmon. It is time we began to educate ourselves out of such preferences and, before it is too late, cease to play God with nature’s bounty.