of cooking whitebait in New Zealand is the whitebait fritter, which is essentially an omelette containing whitebait. Purists use only the egg white in order to minimise interfering with the taste of the bait. The degradation of waterways through forest clearance, and the impacts of agriculture and urbanisation, have caused the whitebait catch to decline. The loss of suitable spawning habitat has been particularly severe, especially for inanga, which rely on dense riparian vegetation lining the tidal portions of waterways. Amongst other factors, a lack of shade over waterways has been shown to kill developing whitebait eggs. United Kingdom In the United Kingdom today, whitebait principally refers to the fry of Clupeidae fish, young sprats, most commonly herring. They are normally deep-fried, coated in flour or a light batter, and served very hot with sprinkled lemon juice and bread and butter. Whitebait are very hard to buy fresh unless the buyer goes to a fishing harbour early in the morning, as most are frozen on the boat. Records of whitebait as a food in England date back to 1612. By the 1780s it was fashionable to dine on whitebait. In those days, whitebait was thought to be a species or group on its own right, and the French zoologist Valenciennes proposed that whitebait was a new genus, which he called Rogenia. In 1903, Dr James Murie, in his 'Report on the sea fisheries and fishing industry of the Thames estuary' conducted studies on the contents of boxes sold as whitebait. He discovered that some boxes of whitebait contained up to 23 species of immature fish, including the fry of eel, plaice, whiting, herring sprat and bass, along with shrimp, crab, octopus and even jellyfish. For Londoners in the 19th century and before, summer excursions down the Thames to Greenwich or Blackwall to dine on whitebait were popular. For instance, the Cabinet undertook such a trip every year shortly before the prorogation of Parliament. An annual whitebait festival takes place in Southend. Given that UK and imported whitebait still consists of immature herring, sprat, sardines, mackerel, bass and many others, it is not an ecologically viable foodstuff. Removing these fish at such a juvenile stage, before they have had a chance to grow and reproduce, might severely reduce future fish stocks. The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) is a non-government organisation that provides independent information on the sustainability of fish stocks and