Tina Rigney, age 13, of Rialto, California, for her question:
What type of fish is a sardine?
A sardine is a young fish and that is about as definite as we can be. He spends his days and nights swimming shoulder to shoulder with perhaps a billion of his kindergarten kinfolk. The silvery little swimmers are almost as close together as sardines in a can. In the hungry sea, perhaps a million or so members of the group will survive. But only an ichthyologist can be sure what type of adult fishes they will become.
The original sardines were named for Sardinia. At least 2,000 years ago, fishermen were catching them off this island and in other parts of the warm, blue Mediterranean Sea. The ancient Romans considered the tasty little fishes a delicacy item on their lavish menus. These sardines also thrived off the shores of Africa and in other warm regions of the eastern Atlantic. Those that escaped the fishermen and the hordes of hungry enemies in the sea grew up to be pilchard type fish. The adults are very flavor¬some food fish. And when they reach their full length of seven inches they are too big to be classed as sardines.
These original sardines still thrive in their native seas but they never became ocean going travelers. However, there are plenty of other sardine type fishes in almost all the oceans of the world. For sardines are merely the small children of larger fishes. Fishes as a rule are very poor parents. At spawning time, billions and billions of their eggs are strewn in the water to take their chances of survival. Most of the eggs are devoured by famished fishes and other sea dwellers. Those that hatch drift helplessly near the sunlit surface in masses of assorted plankton.
Most of these tiny beginners are also devoured. But their numbers are so astronomical that billions of them survive and grow to be finger sized sardines. Teeming swarms of the small fishes throng together in schools. There may be five billion classmates in just one school, swimming together in the same direction. Their silvery little bodies slither through the water almost, but not quite, close enough to touch each other. Together they may form a shimmering, mile wide carpet just below the waves.
A school of sardines may be a billion or more young tarpon, striving to grow up and become big, shiny adults. Avery few of them will reach a length of seven feet ¬and perhaps get caught by game fishermen. Other sardines are young sea going trout. The largest and most plentiful sardine schools are the youngsters of herring and mackerel. These fishes will continue to swim in close formation through the rest of their lives. Other sardines are young salmon, on their way out to the deep ocean from where they will return years later to spawn the next generation of little fishes. Though the original pilchard sardine stays near the Mediterranean, he has pilchard cousins in other seas. These pilchards also produce swarms of sardines almost as tasty as the originals.
Some years ago, pilchard type sardines were found off the coast of California. Vast schools of the dainty little fishes thrived all the way from Baja California northward to Alaska. Fishermen went forth to catch them in countless tons. Canneries sprang up to pack them for market, maybe too many of the baby fishes were taken and not enough were left to hand on life to more sardines. In any case, their numbers suddenly dwindled the fisher had to seek other fish and some canneries went out of business.