Catches of his days

Published on Saturday 14 February 2004 00:00

The Longshoreman

by Richard Shelton

Atlantic Books, 14.99

BORN in 1942, Richard Shelton grew up in a more innocent age, when small boys could wander around the countryside and explore its burns and rivers without fear of the dangers that seem to lurk around every corner today. Paddling in a Buckinghamshire river and fishing for minnows set the scene for a career in which he became one of our most distinguished marine biologists.

Shelton not only headed the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory at Pitlochry from 1982 to 2001 but he is now scientific adviser to the Atlantic Salmon Association. As his memoir shows, he is not the kind of scientist who is unable to communicate the wonder of the natural world, but that rarer breed altogether, one who is such a fine writer that he can effortlessly open it up to those who would otherwise remain ignorant.

The result is a book that is not only a well crafted autobiography but which does for marine biology what David Bellamy did for botany, making what might seem a forbidding subject come alive. I simply would not have believed that anyone could write so entertainingly about the toenails of the lobster, or the nasal hairs of the brown shrimp.

His association with Scotland is a long one - he began his professional career in St Andrews and spent time in Aberdeenshire, at Craigdam near Tarves, about which he writes with a keen eye for the telling anecdote.

Central to the book is the story of the development of fisheries science and of the concerns that have existed since the 1800s: the term "over-fishing", he points out, was first used as early as 1854. As well as uncovering the history of Scottish and English fish research agencies, he highlights the changing fortunes of salmon fishing in Scotland.

As he follows the salmon’s progress from egg to alevin, from smolt, through grilse to many-sea-wintered adult fish, he investigates some of the mysteries in its life-cycle, such as the homing instinct that allows Scotland’s salmon to find their way back from the Greenland and Faroese feeding grounds. He describes graphically the cruelty of the monofilament nylon gill net, invisible to fish and other creatures too, such as guillemots and porpoises. He tells how stocks that would have replenished American and Canadian rivers as well as those of Europe have been plundered off the Greenland and Faroese coasts since the discovery of the feeding grounds there, of how catches in excess of 2,000 tons were the norm until international regulations were put in place and of how the drift netting continued off the coast of Ireland and North East England even after that.

Now coastal netting and river stations have largely been bought off and anglers wait for an improvement in stocks. But Shelton argues that there is still a huge danger from high-seas nets and from the over-establishment of fish farms.

That danger is to the sea trout, too, for their numbers have been hugely depleted in the West Coast rivers of Scotland, the likely cause being the infestation of sea lice, which goes with salmon farming.

Will the salmon recover? The jury is perhaps still out, though Richard Shelton is hopeful.

This is a pure delight of a book, evoking treasured childhood memories and providing a valuable and entertaining insight into the cutting edge science that may be the saviour of one of our most precious assets.