Pursuing a friendly demon

Among the marine bric-a-brac that lines our window-sills, a remarkable set of teeth catches the light like an elaborate ivory carving. It is a fish's lower jaw, into which you could comfortably fit your elbow - well, not comfortably, since about 60 slender, needlesharp teeth, some an inch long, prick the skin like a penitent's arm-chain. The teeth curve inwards and will bend back even further to admit their prey.

I found the jaw, wave-polished, on a winter beach at the north of Inishbofin and prize it for its extraordinary power to evoke, like the grin of the Cheshire cat, the creature that owned it. The hint of illusion is appropriate, since this and another almost equally grotesque-looking fish have been involved in an increasingly lucrative, culinary sleight-of-hand.

I am talking about monkfish and what you actually get on your plate, richly sauced, when you order this delicacy in any upmarket Irish restaurant. Is it Squatina squatina, the monkfish, or angel shark, or Lophius piscatorius, the angler fish also known as monkfish?

Let us start with the prior claimant to the name, Squatina, which at least, as Alan Davidson points out, "is generally agreed to present an ecclesiastical appearance". Halfway between shark and ray, and with the same cartilaginous bones, its large pectoral fins spread from a flattened body and squashed-bulldog head very much like the cloak of a medieval monk. It has, in George Lassalle's words "the face of a friendly demon designed by Hieronymous Bosch, and a tail that is food fit for angels".

Lassalle, writing The Adventurous Fish Cook in the 1970s, may have helped to fulfil a sad prophecy. "My only dread," he wrote, "it that its increasing use and the discovery of its qualities may make it fashionable for restaurant dishes and consequently remove it from regular supply to the shopping public. There are ominous reports that it is being used to supplement lobster and scampi dishes in forward-looking restaurants."

In his classic North Atlantic Seafood, a few years later, Alan Davidson had a parallel tale, but applied to the other "monkfish": "A friend at Billingsgate once said to me: `If Mr X comes down and orders two whole lobsters and forty pounds of angler tail, I know what's on the menu that evening and it isn't angler'." And angler is now, certainly, the "monkfish" on any Irish menu.

The uncouth Lophius, owner of the bottom denture on my windowsill (and pictured below) is, like Squatina, a flattened, seabed fish but infinitely more cryptic. Lobes of skin like little fronds of seaweed flutter at the fringe of its rounded, frog-like head, breaking the shape and blurring the line of its mouth. Along with the SAS camouflage comes a dirty trick. A long filament, a modified dorsal fin ray, suspends a little flag of tissue as a fishing lure just above the mouth. When the angler sees a meal coming - often a flatfish - it twitches the lure gently, drawing its prey to a rash investigation.

For the late, great Jane Grigson, who knew all about its habits, monkfish was angler tail and her favourite fish after sole and turbot: "Cold, with mayonnaise, it is one of the best summer dishes I know". On the rare occasions we can stump up for it at the travelling fish-van, we respect her advice to take only a big tail: the small ones can be pretty tasteless.

Grigson, Davidson and Lasalle are just three of the cookery writers whose books in the 1970s helped to shape the tastes and markets of this affluent foodie era. Before that decade, anglers were a big and ugly fish discarded by most Irish fishermen from the whitefish catches of otter and beam trawls. Within 10 years, landings of angler to Ireland soared from 100 to 2,000 tonnes a year, much of it from waters off the east coast.

International catches around Ireland have soared too, to perhaps 10 times the weight landed in Ireland. Spanish trawlers from Vigo have, allegedly, been dropping miles of tangle-net to the sea-bed on their way north and hauling them again 14 days later for whatever anglers are still intact and saleable: a singularly destructive way of fishing.

Close to the Irish coast, it is the white-bellied species of angler, L. piscatorius, that predominates; the black-bellied species Lophius budegassa becomes more important moving south and in greater depths. But both species are under pressure as the fishery moves out to deeper water, into areas that were once a refuge for the adult fish.

Here they lay extraordinary ribbons of eggs, as much as 9m long and 3m wide, floating as silvery veils in the water column. Data on their populations is still too recent to prove much, but there are already serious concerns that stocks to the north of Ireland are "outside safe biological limits".

Meanwhile, for all of George Lasalle's enthusiasm (which extended, indeed, to sharks in general), the "true" monkfish, Squatina, still seems to have significance only for anglers of the human kind. Historically, Clew Bay, Blacksod and Tralee Bay were outstanding angling-grounds for the species, but in 1998 only two monkfish were recorded nationally (one of them a 53-pound fish caught at Fenit, compared with 100 a decade or so ago. Perhaps, at some west coast restaurants, customers for monkfish are actually eating the real thing.

A superb and most unusual photograph of a swimming angler, taken off Valentia Island by Dublin-born diver Nigel Motyer, is one of the delights in the first issue of Wild Ireland, the magazine on wildlife and environment that Ireland has been needing for years.

The publishers, based in Co Kildare, cut their teeth with an imaginative website (www.wildireland.ie), and the bi-monthly magazine arrives with a confidence and polish to match anything on the newsstands. Along with expert natural history, it offers a timely focus for Ireland's green NGOs: a blend of readers that should guarantee success.