Whitebait

What is whitebait? People still ask the question. So far as Britain is concerned, it can be answered in two lines by saying that the name applies to the fry of various clupeoid fish, notably the herring and the sprat, and often mixed together. But the question used to cause great perplexity.

Whitebait are tiny fish, transparent or silver-white, which used to be fished in huge quantities in the tidal waters of the Thames, and elsewhere. Their size varies now, as it did in the past; but the figure of 180 to the pound weight may be taken as typical. Dr James Murie, in his Report on the Sea Fisheries and Fishing Industries of the Thames Estuary (1903), gave painstaking analyses of the contents of boxes of whitebait, and showed that as many as thirty-two different species might be found therein. The fry of twenty-one different fish, including eels, plaice and lumpfish, turned up from time to time, together with various shrimps, crabs, octopus and even jellyfish! But these intruders were few in number, compared with the tiny herrings and sprats.