On The Rock Waiting For The Roll

Writer Stephen Smith takes to Newfoundland’s shores in his quest to see the ‘capelin roll’ — the spawning spectacle of a tiny fish with a massive ecological, historical and cultural impact

- Stephen Smith

CAPELIN IS A SMALL FISH but larger than an Anchovie. It is of considerable importance to the Fishery of this Country. What I have to say of Capelin is of so strange a nature that I am very much afraid you will doubt my veracity.

— From The Newfoundland Journal of Aaron Thomas, able seaman in H.M.S. Boston, 1794-95

SUMMER DOESN’T START in Newfoundland and Labrador, so they say, until the capelin roll. Only once thousands of fingerling fish start tossing themselves en masse onto the province’s beaches to spawn will the skies clear and the rain abate as the season shifts over, one to the next. Or as the St. John’s novelist Edward Riche says of the capelin: “My experience is that summer weather will not arrive in Newfoundland until they have completed their piscine orgy.”

Whether or not they can trigger seasons (spoiler alert: they can’t), the tiny species that science knows as Mallotus villosus is, in the parlance, a focal forage fish. That’s another way of saying they’re high in fat and rich in energy — very nutritious (and that everything eats them) seals, whales, seabirds, other bigger fish.

Dallying down near the bottom of the food chain, capelin don’t exactly dominate the popular imagination.

And yet their significance to the balance of the northwest Atlantic’s marine ecosystem is hard to overstate. While cod sustained the Newfoundland economy and way of life for centuries, it was the capelin they were devouring that brought them inshore by shoal upon teeming shoal.