Silverside, Atlantic Silverside

This north American species covers the waterfront up to the Gulf of St Lawrence. Its common names include green smelt, shiner, whitebait, spearing and sperling. These fish congregate in shoals, close inshore, and willingly enter brackish waters. They have been described, when spawning in sedge grass at the head of a bay, as rolling about and jumping out of the water in such numbers that the water was ‘whitened with the milt, and the grass so full of eggs that they could be taken out by the handful’. Cheerful, fecund little creatures.