Whitebait

whitebait tiny fish, transparent or silver-white, were thought in the past to be a separate species of small fish, the subject of much argument among natural historians; the Frenchman Valenciennes even created a new genus, Rogenia, to accommodate the puzzling little creatures. However, they are now firmly identified, at least so far as Britain is concerned, as the fry of various fish of the herring family, but mainly of the herring itself and the sprat. In other English-speaking countries the term may be used for a similar mixture, for example the fry of silverside or sand-eel in New England; or for a mixture of quite different fish, e.g. the young of freshwater fish, notably Galaxias maculatus, the inanga, in New Zealand. Incidentally, these galaxiid fish have an interesting lifecycle, which takes them out to sea and back again at the beginning of their lives, and are the object of special fisheries when they swim back, tiny and transparent, to their native rivers; all this is admirably described by Peat (1979).