Lanterns and boars: fascinating fingers of fish food

Days and nights of wind: not quite the worst we’ve known, but very nearly. Terraces of waves piled up to the horizon and tumbling down a slope of foam to claw at the edge of the dunes. Polytunnel shuddering in its saving nest of trees, old greenhouse flayed of ancient putty, the Brussels sprouts knocked flat. Indoors, the woodstove whining, candles lined up on the windowsills, matches and Scrabble board handy . . .

Once, in the 1980s, such a storm left the tideline littered with thousands of dead fish, all with gills snapped forward in some tumultuous surge of sandy water. Most were the rockfish of inshore waters: ballan and cuckoo wrasse, brilliant little goldsinny, coal-black lesser forkbeards like outsize tadpoles. But with them came much bigger and eminently edible fish: pollack and whiting, ling and silver hake, of which we scavenged a big bagful for the freezer.

Opportunities
Prompted by the memory, and disinclined to venture forth, I used the amazing persistence of electricity at this last tendril of the line to download the new Stock Book produced by the Marine Institute in Galway. This reports on the state of the fish stocks exploited by the Irish fleet and advises on managing "opportunities" for the coming year. Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney took it with him to Brussels before Christmas for the fisheries negotiations with the European Union.

Defeat of good scientific sense in the process of political bargaining, routine for years, was actually overtaken in December by agreement on ending the discard of unwanted fish. But of 59 stocks of fish surveyed in the Stock Book, a quarter were still being overfished, and 42 per cent were still being fished "at unknown levels".

Among the latter are some of the smallest and most fascinating fish of deep water, newly targeted for trawling in the hunt for species to be minced into food for farmed salmon and other fish – even, indeed, for the human frying pan. Two of them, Mueller’s pearlside and glacial lantern fish, are dominant species of the “twilight zone” of ocean: the layer between the depth at which light fades, about 100m, and the deep total darkness at 1,000m.

Like most mesopelagic fish, as they’re called, the pearlside and lantern fish spend the day in the deep and rise several hundred metres at night, to feed on zooplankton near the surface. They are tiny – 5cm-8cm – and quite beautiful, glinting with rainbow colours but shyly hard to photograph, even by hardy Norwegian divers plumbing fiords at midnight. (Try Rudolf Svensen online at uwphoto.no.)

Mesopelagic species swim round much of the world, and their protein potential excited the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation as early as the 1970s. Iceland began fishing them in 2009, taking 28,000 tonnes of pearlside in one February alone. Russia has been fishing them, too, off the Faroes, and Irish and Scottish vessels have begun trial fishing off the north and west of these islands. They are important prey for mackerel, hake and blue whiting, and the Stock Book urges a pause while their role in the food web becomes clearer.

Meanwhile, Ireland forges ahead in exploiting another little fish: the boarfish of my drawing, about the size of a human hand and weighing no more than 60g. This subtropical fish has hugely increased in the eastern Atlantic with warming of the sea bed in the Bay of Biscay, and its shoals are now especially abundant off the southwest of Ireland. Once regarded as a spiny, entangling little nuisance and hugely discarded by Irish boats trawling for mackerel and herring, it became a prime new catch through developments in technology for pumping the catch ashore.

Prickly
The market initially was as raw material for fishmeal. But a trade deal with China in 2012 opened prospects for direct human consumption, raising the value of boarfish from €200 a tonne to a possible €1,000. Irish vessels already land more than 56,000 tonnes a year and have welcomed a further big rise in December's EU boarfish quota.

The first dedicated study of the stock of boarfish in the northeast Atlantic and the Mediterranean began last autumn. It could show if it’s true that the animal is far too prickly to have any real significance in the ocean’s predatory food chain. Too small to fillet easily, but stripped of its spiny skin, how are morsels of boarfish to be marketed and eaten? Bord Iascaigh Mhara has considered minced blocks, to be shaped into fish fingers and pâtés, and has welcomed a notion for Irish tapas, ready-breaded and “rich in heart-healthy Omega 3”. All, of course, from fish “sustainably caught in the wild”.

Along with such a brand identity, a need is felt for a new name, something a bit less brutish and coarse. “Nemo” might suit the fish alive, but we don’t want the kiddies crying over their fish fingers.