The life and hard times of the halibut have been such that to most people its delectable taste is at best a fond memory. Once thousands of tons of the formidable flatfish, some weighing more than 500lb, were landed at ports like Aberdeen, and trawler skippers would be photographed beside enormous specimens up to six feet long.
But after the Second World War overfishing led to a drastic decline, and now the halibut (Hippoglossus hippoglossus), a North Atlantic species slow to grow and to reach sexual maturity, has become rare.
With halibut fetching up to รบ2 a pound at Billingsgate, the Sea Fish Industry Authority (SFIA) is hopeful that it can farm stocks in much the same way as salmon. A flotilla of "test tube" tiddlers in a tank in their Scottish marine farming unit are the product of six years' research and the intended founding fathers and mothers of a race of captive halibut.
Staff at the unit at Ardtoe, 30 miles from Fort William on the west coast of Scotland, stripped two million eggs from one of their adult females, fertilized them and incubated about 700,000, from which 20,000 larvae emerged. Twelve remain, reflecting the survival rates that apply in the ocean.
Alan Hopper, technical director of the SFIA, said: "It is a bit like the first human transplant - we have a survivor. It is a slow process. We have got them from being dependent on food from the egg sac to fending for themselves."
The halibut will eventually be kept in cages immersed in sea lochs and the inlet at Ardtoe. Because halibut are bottom-living fish, they would not be happy with a cage floor made of bars and will have to be provided with a dark, opaque floor.
They will probably be reared to the diameter of a plate-sized Dover sole. But all authorities seem to agree that, at any reasonable size, it is a delicious fish with firm flesh which bakes well and does not dry out.
"`The fish farming industry needs to diversify because the demand and price for salmon and salmon trout fluctuates. It is like farming on land and concentrating on pigs or lamb to the exclusion of everything else," Hopper says.
If all goes well, the prospects for new jobs are bright. Up to 1,000 people are already employed in an industry which produces 15,000 tonnes of salmon each year at 4,000 a tonne. Turbot, a relative of the halibut which prefers warmer water, is already farmed in the Mediterranean, particularly by the Spanish. Norwegian biologists are working on the halibut and the SFIA is concerned that a lack of investment may leave Britain lagging behind.
Roaming at depths of 50-2,000 metres, but making hunting forays into the upper regions, halibut prey on fish as large as haddock and herring. It would not be economic to feed them whole fish so a substitute will need to be devised.
If the nursery halibut dislike their new diet, a generation of post-war children, given reviled doses of halibut oil, may feel justice has at least been done.
