Turning over small stones

TOSS temporarily closed.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:42:00 +0000

Gotta put a stop to the blogging for a bit. Work contract terminal and much tidying up to do.

I may be able to notch up the odd post here and there but certainly not the two or three a week frequency I was aiming for. And definitely not the more detailed biology based posts which take a deal of background reading and preparing. Even if they don't look like that when they hit the interwaves. But once I come out of this stretch I should have time for more. Quite a bit more if plans all go well. But then plans have to go well or the mouse ends up smeared with butter and shoved down the pipe of oblivion to clean the fluff. Which is a bad thing in case you were wondering.

Toodle pip
Eccles.

Random Quotes XXIII

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:21:00 +0000

Sadly David Foster Wallace is no longer with us. He hanged himself in his apartment in 2008. What a loss. He wrote with a verve and flair that is rarely encountered. He is also incredibly dense, plumbing the depths of a particular analysis which demands you make a real effort to keep up. He is the author (with Bywater) who indicated that footnotes are acceptable; that to go off on sometimes long discursive subtexts is what you should do if what prompts the thought does not sit well in the main text. Reviewers (and readers it has to be said) do get terribly frustrated with this aspect of his writing but, hard to follow though it is at times, I like it.
Here is a section from the chapter that gives this book its title - "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." He is commissioned by Harper's to go on one of the Mega cruises that pligh the Carribean and report back on what he finds - "They say all they want is a sort of really big experiential postcard - go, plow the Caribbean in style, come back, say what you've seen." Interestingly I too was scared witless by Jaws (I was only nine when it came out and I was taken to see it) and subsequently devoured a book about shark attacks (I think it is this one but it was a long time ago and I don't have it now) in a similar (if not quite so memorized) manner to Foster Wallace.

This one incident made the Chicago news. Some weeks before I underwent my own Luxury Cruise, a sixteen-year-old male did a Brody off the upper deck of a Megaship - I think a Carnival or Crystal - a suicide. The news version was that it had been an unhappy adolescent love thing, a shipboard romance gone bad, etc. I think part of it was something else, something there's no way a real news story could cover.
There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir - especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and gaiety-noise ceased - I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simply admixture - a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.
I predict this'll get cut by the editor, but I need to cover some background. I, who have never before this cruise actually been on the ocean, have always associated the ocean with dread and death. As a little kid I used to memorize shark-fatality data. Not just attacks. Fatalities. The Albert Kogler fatality off Baker's Beach CA in 1959 (Great White). The U.S.S. Indianapolis smorgasbord off the Philippines in 1945 (many varieties, authorities think mostly Tigers and Blues)⁵; the most-fatalities-attributed-to-a-single-shark series of incidents around Matawan/Spring Lake NJ in 1916 (Great white again; this time they caught a carcharias in Raritan Bay NJ and found human parts in gastro (I know which parts and whose)). In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls. Anyway, hence the atavistic shark fetish, which I have to admit came back with a long-repressed vengeance on this Luxury Cruise⁶, and that I made such a fuss about the one (possible) dorsal fin I saw off starboard that my companions at supper's Table 64 finally had to tell me, with all possible tact, to shut up about the fin already.

5. I'm doing this from memory. I don't need a book. I can still name every documented Indianapolis fatality, including some serial numbers and hometowns. (Hundreds of men lost, 80 classed as Shark, 7-10 August '45; The Indianapolis had just delivered Little Boy to the island of Tinian for delivery to Hiroshima, so ironists take note. Robert Shaw as Quint reprised the whole incident in 1975's Jaws, a film that, as you can imagine, was like fetish-porn to me at age thirteen.
6. And I'll admit that on the very first night of the 7NC I asked the staff of the Nadir's Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant whether I could maybe have a spare bucket of au jus drippings from supper so I could try chumming for sharks off the back rail of the top deck and that this request struck everybody from the maître d' on down as disturbing and maybe even disturbed, and that it turned out to be a serious journalistic faux pas, because I'm almost positive the maître d' passed this disturbing tidbit on to Mr. Dermatitis and that it was a big reason why I was denied access to stuff like the ship's galley, thereby impoverishing the sensuous scope of this article. (Plus it also revealed how little I understood the Nadir's sheer size: twelve decks and 150 feet up, the au jus drippings would have dispersed into a vague red cologne by the time they hit the water, with concentrations of blood inadequate to attract or excite a serious shark, whose fin would have probably looked like a pushpin from that height, anyway.

The Christmas Spirit.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 04:38:00 +0000

We get a number of these "the-year-in-summary" christmas cards/letters at this time of year. You know the ones, computer derived with a few "cute" photos of children pasted into the main text body. They go into the detail of how Tamara has just passed grade 15 piano and been accepted to Juilliard even thought she is only eight years old; and how the other unfortunate offspring of the parental loins is now head-boy and travelling through the Amazonian jungle dispensing condoms. These notes always leave out the news that the family's breadwinner has been made redundant and the bank are foreclosing on the house. So it goes.

This type of missive sours me further to this season of joy and glad tidings - I am a modern scrooge boosted by a year ending cocktail of prozac, alcohol and cynicism. But all talk and no trousers leads a blind mole up a dark wynd as they rarely say around here. So, to keep in with a christmas spirit here is our year in review christmas card to the nations.

Dear (insert whichever family name we care least about here),
Well another year has lurched through the months and buggered off to oblivion where it doubtless will be seated in a high-backed wicker chair, a blanket over its knees and a monumental Scotch clasped in shaking digits wishing the previous twelve months had all been just a dream and worrying that its "Now That's What I Call.." selection won't be better than 2010. Our extended family has breezed through the

period with all colours flapping. Much has been achieved once again and it is an education to see the offspring developing along the varied paths they (or the authorities) have chosen for them.

The son had a good year. Compared to last. His tenure at the School for Boys with Incurable Tendencies has only one year left to run though he may graduate early. As his head teacher said, "he should go far," and then mumbled something under his breath I couldn't quite catch. He has made friends, which is a change, and is out a lot at night too. Probably over at the house of one of these new acquaintances, watching films, playing cards. Or the like. The heavy bag of tools he takes with him is, I gather, to help his homework. These schools don't do Aristotle and arithmetic but incline to less cerebral but otherwise wholly healthy occupations. Plumbing, electricioning, locksmithing.

Just recently a man asked about son's whereabouts after which there has been a permanently occupied car parked across the street. I didn't know there were talent scouts for the line of work he appears to be taking.

Oldest daughter, is looking fit and well. Better than her piano teacher anyway. I am sure she didn't mean to set fire to the piano. It was all just a misunderstanding. And dousing the thing in petrol first was just an enthusiastic, if misguided attempt at performance art. It will be difficult to find another teacher for her now especially as the conservatoire, where she first started her lessons, has yet to be rebuilt. You know if you wander past the building site you can still catch the faint aroma of charred timbers. Anyway, the music director informed me that there were "no teachers available" to continue her lessons. He was rather terse. Something these musical types tend to be I think. Probably needs a holiday. Anyway the bill for the last teachers skin graft was rather high so no immediate musical future for out little ~~arsonist~~ virtuoso. Which leads me onto middle daughter.

She was to have started school this year and was very excited at the prospect. Such a darling girl. Blue-eyed and still retaining those Shirley Temple curls she has had since she was a baby. Athletic and bright she was the apple of the eye of all the staff at her nursery. But, given the medical bill from her sister's 'incident' and the prospect of litigation we've had to sell her into slavery.

I don't know where youngest is. Did see her last month while she was eating from her bowl with the cats. She has a special affinity for them. I let her out to do her business in the vegetable patch as usual and haven't seen her since. Maybe the neighbours are feeding her.

Eccles has performed very few grievous acts of fishing this year and as a consequence has made the lives of the rest of the family more interesting. The Overhead Camshaft hasn't had to worry about that at all though. Not since she discovered that buying gin in bulk from out of state was both legal and cheaper than buying it here.

We hope you all have a very, very christmas.

Eccles and family.

Random Quotes XXII

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Not for the first time in the RQ series and certainly not for the last, here is another from Ted Kooser's collection Delights and Shadows.

The Early Bird
Still dark, and raining hard
on a cold May morning

and yet the early bird
is out there chirping,

chirping its sweet-sour
wooden-pulley notes,

pleased, it would seem,
to be given work,

hauling the heavy
bucket of dawn

up from the darkness,
note over note,

and letting us drink.

Senility.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

The picture below is of a section of one of the bookcases in our 'green room.' I had grand designs when we moved in here, wanted wall to wall shelving and to call it "The Library." Then I found out how much fitted shelves would cost and also decided that a library should really exceed a certain size. Enough to swing a vermin in at least. Swinging a vermin in the green room would result in said animal's head banging continually against the shelving, door frames and ... where are those bloody vermin?

This section you see below is one of the places The Starship Enterprise returns books to, books that I have left strewn around the rest of the house. She cannot, in the sense that she is not allowed, put them back in their place. There is no place, or at least a 'place' on the shelves is a concept in perpetual flux. Being a man I naturally have this thing for collections and then organising and reorgansing the constituents of said collection. It might be that the books have been arranged alphabetically by author. Or by subject. Or by publisher, ISBN number or cover art. Or by when they were bought. Or where they were bought. Or ... you get the picture. The Battlestar Galactica has long learned that it is an error punishable by much whining and pre-pubescent complaint to stick a book willy-nilly back into the shelf.

Here in the picture we have the last of the eroded remnants of a reorganisation based on what looks like subject. There are too many fishing books together in one place for it to be organised by say volumes containing the most profanities, or the funniest use of the word 'duck.' In view there are both Braithwaite and Schullery representing respectively the very, very good and truly awful of the ethics debate about which a post will eventually appear. There are naturally some Gierach's including the anthology 'Death, Taxes and Leaky Waders' which I got on a whim before knowing anything about the writer. I have a love-hate affair with anthologies. An anthology can give you the range of a writer has produced and if you end up not liking the output nothing is really lost. But, and again this may just be that male obsession with collecting again, if I do like the writer I am annoyed I have truncated a number of their books by 'dipping' rather than getting the original volumes. Which I have now done with Gierach. With him are some other fine angling authors, Sparse Grey Hackle, Ted Leeson, Arthur Ransome, BB, James Babb and Charles Rangely-Wilson. And some not so fine. Osthoff's 'No Match To Hatch' was bought for the title and turned into particularly narrow-minded 'how-to' book. I have never really got on with Wetherall or David Hughes even though I bought 'Big Indian Creek' on the recommendation of Gierach. And the other Hughes, sandwiched between 'Another Lousy Day in Paradise' and BB's 'Fisherman's Folly' was pleasant enough but wholly mundane on the ethical issue when I expected something a lot better from the man.
Away from fishing volumes I see there are a couple by Barry Lopez. The, at times, sublime 'Desert Notes and River Notes' and a sort of autobiography, 'About This Life' which includes an excellent essay on American's and their geography. There is a biography of Bruce Chatwin, an author whose work would have been straight in the 'Must Read' book list on the right but after consuming this volume I had to reappraise him. There is Kapuscinski which I read again because I realised that I had said it was a great book in a post earlier this year but then could remember lttle of the contents. It is a really good book. Joseph Heller is there because recently I couldn't remember the name of one of the characters in Catch-22 (Milo Mindbender) and couldn't find the latter volume and now fear I have leant it to one of the older children and will never see it back. Asimov features as I re-read the Foundation series and 'A Picture of Dorian Gray' sampled for a Random Quotes post.

Despite not being the point of this post I could go on and on about the books here. They are redolent of their own place in my life, each having a history. Some are short and fleeting leaving not much of a stain (Quammen, for example, though brilliant in 'The Song of the Dodo' (see right) is very hit and miss in his essay collections). Others I can follow back through time. Douglas Adams' book 'Last Chance to See' was bought in a small bookshop in Blackheath, south London. I was delighted to find a different book by Adams and doubly so to discover its subject matter. As it is, one of my new favourite essayists (Bargepole a.k.a. the Lost Worlds author Michael Bywater who I have plagiarised a number of times here, and will continue to do so, was the model for Dirk Gently, the eponymous hero of Adam's series following Hitch Hikers. What is more Bywater's entry on the Rhinocerous' nasal passage used in RQ XIII was much influenced by Adams' description of how Rhinocerous' see the world though smell in Last Chance to See). You see, I am at it again. This is why the Millenium Falcon sometimes catches me staring at the bookshelf as if in suspended animation. It strikes me that an entertaining posting meme might be to get everyone to take a picture of their bookshelves to see what is on them. I am a nosey bastard about this sort of stuff and a pig at the trough when visiting other peoples houses, their bookshelves an automatic magnet. Are they Dan Brown or Mikhail Bulgakov, fiction or fact, modern or classical?

Anyway, the point about this post then. Yes to get back to the point. One of the books on my Christmas list was Roderick Haig-Brown's A River Never Sleeps. I have Seasons of a Fisherman, it is in the pile of books at my bedside and I have read it a number of times. However, hallowed as he is and much as I enjoy him I can't really say that he does anything more for me than being a pleasant read. And then I realised that I might be basing my almost indifference on this one collection and not on the book most mention. Namely, yes, A River Never Sleeps. So I decided I should get it and when The Commercial Towing Spaceship Nostromo asked what books I wanted this was first on the list. Now you will, if you have perused the titles in the picture with even feigned interest wonder what the arse Eccles is going on about. There it bloody well is for chrissake. Yes, indeed. Imagine my surprise as I stood in front of these books to suddenly twig that it was there. Where did it come from I wondered? I asked The Heart of Gold whether she had already bought it for Christmas and for some strange reason decided to hide it in plain view. A needle amongst other needles as it were. The delightful Millenium Flacon was at some pains to persuade me that she hadn't done anything of the sort and what is more that I should stop gawping at those bloody books and clean the toilets as I had, apparently promised to do this weekend. I nodded in an absent minded way. The toilets can wait. One of the vermin will eventually fall in while taking a drink and then I can give the bowl a thorough wipe as I haul it out. Where did that book come from? I do have a good memory. I don't remember getting this book. It is almost enough to make one believe in divine providence. Well, not really, lets be sensible here. But if this is the way a god manifested himself, by secretly putting classic works of fishing literature on my shelves... well....

Hitch

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 12:27:00 +0000

Other places will do this better but I feel a blog such as this should note the passing of Christopher Hitchens who died yesterday from complications associated with the esophageal cancer that was going to kill him soon anyway. Hitchens wrote any number of good books, against religion, against the cult of Mother Teressa, on being an atheist, and books on Clinton and Kissinger among other essay collections and most recently a memoir. He also wrote about his declining health, the inevitable end and how he was dealing with it in Vanity Fair where he was a contributing editor for nearly 20 years. The pieces, (which you can find here, here and here) are beautifully written and poignant. I suppose it may be somewhat macabre to want to read the thoughts of a dying man but there is an undoubted fascination with how others we admire meet their end. We are, after all, going down that route and will come to it soon enough.

What made him a favourite was not that I agreed with everything he wrote and thought - I didn't. But through his thinking and writing, his close arguments on a number of topics (his support for George W. Bush for example so that the war against Iraq and Afghanistan would be prosecuted) I could at least see there was a point to his position and one that could be usefully debated. In the end I would far rather read and think about a point of view from a thoughtful person who I might disagree with than an empty-headed wannabe whose vacuous utterances I might, at the most insubstantial level, agree with. There aren't enough of the former and unfortunately there is one less now.

Update: over at the New York Times I just found this really lovely tribute to Hitchens from his long time friend, the author Ian McEwan. Well worth a read.

On Running.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:25:00 +0000

I have been running recently. Since August as it happens. The Hundred Metre Sprint insisted I go for one when my crotchiness became too much even for her. I say since August but not running since August you understand, not continually. Afterall I am not some asinine Forrest Gump. Asinine maybe.

And I don’t mean the occasional jog (hmm, just into the second paragraph and I revert to the snob I know I am). Jogging, that ten minute a mile pace, that amble so-close-to-walking-that-it-makes-no-difference, is not what I have been doing. Admittedly at the start my pace would have been no more than a walk, the gasping for breath, the burning muscles engendering a type of 'running' that was barely moving forward. But it was running, both feet in the air at the same time - albeit a nanosecond during the early stages.
The trouble with deciding not to do any exercise, deciding that the bohemian lifestyle of wine, whiskey ~~women~~ and cigarettes was the way to go, is that it shows a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. When the motivations change, the cigarettes discarded, energy levels increase to near manic levels and a profound fear of fat settles around your waist like some incipient inflatable toy so that you suddenly find, as Case did in Gibson’s memorable phrase, you have fallen into the prison of your own flesh. Fishing, though outside and with some of that wading thing, does nothing to alleviate this predicament and the fear of not seeing your feet again is tangible.

Exercise is not completely alien to me. It is, or was I should say, my job for a decade after leaving school. Teaching it, doing it. But as with childish things it was put away and subsequently rolled out only for brief social sojourns. I have always had a hate affair with running anyway. Forced running, the kind one is made to do for competition, for the glory of the house, of the school, for anything that could be thought valued in that Edwardian atmosphere. True when my profession was sport I had to run. But this was invisible running, not real running. One had to run to get the ball. One had to run sometimes for a long time, sometimes fast, sometimes with lots of jinks, swerves and changes of pace. But it was the ball and its manipulation that was the focus not the mundanity of how to perambulate to, or run with it. Running was simply the invisible and unacknowledged skein which linked all the other skills.

But running can be much more visceral than that. I knew it then if I cared to think about it and have rediscovered it now. Without the stigma of achieving something (though that occurs), without the desperate expectation to improve on a time or distance (though those too occur) running brings a simple exhilaration. For me (and here is where it is not jogging) it comes from moving fast across indifferent terrain, up dale, down slope, through stream, over deadfall, foot-working across the cobbled bedrock broken through the turf skin on the side of the ridge. Even, and I kid not, running next to Whitetails whose befuddlement for the brief occasions managed made me whoop with laughter.

We are running men. Not in a Bachmann sense but in the way we have evolved. Our shape, our proportions have designed us to move. We are Kipling's yellow dog dingo chasing Kangaroo to his true form. And it feels good. In those all too brief winks when early aches have been smoothed by warming blood and the heaviness of fatigue have not yet dulled the sense and limbs.
If I turn right after I leave my front door and follow the road I have a six hundred foot climb covering two miles to get to the top of the ridge. There is no down. There is no flat. Just up to the top. Sometimes I do this. It is a form of discipline and opens up the path along the hilltop. But tomorrow I will run one of the ascents through the wood and reach the false summit some hundred feet below the top. Once there I will stutter at a pace that lets my breath calm after the climb, I will not make much progress for a minute. I will be almost jogging on the spot. But then I will take off and for ten minutes before my age erodes my ability, I will be grinning like a Cheshire cat as my running feet turn the world beneath me.

Random Quotes XXI

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Ah, I wish I could put up the famous recording of Richard Burton reading this passage but I couldn't find it. Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood. This is just the beginning there is much more. So put on your best Welsh accent, get the pace right and, very importantly, read this aloud. "It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies." Simply marvelous.

Under Milk Wood.
FIRST VOICE

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,
courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the
sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night
in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat
there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock,
the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds.
And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are
sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers,
the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher,
postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman,
drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot
cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft
or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux,
bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the
organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the
bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And
the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields,
and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed
yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly,
streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded
town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the
invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed
stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the
Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover,
the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional
salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row,
it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, starfall,
the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in
bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and
bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes,
fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a
domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse with gloves;
in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night
in Donkey Street, trotting silent, With seaweed on its
hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot,
text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours
done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night
neddying among the snuggeries of babies.

Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the
Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of
Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed;
tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Tickled.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:43:00 +0000

More shrinkage.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:29:00 +0000

Seren... Serin...Serendipit.... By some devious route, a route I couldn't possibly follow again, I found this paper¹ which is a nice addition to the shrinkage post two below. Guidetti and Micheli in a short note suggest that not only can photos of past catches be used to illustrate and analyse fisheries decline in the 21st century but so can art. And ancient art at that.

Photo credits: (a) P. Panzalis; (b) Figure from the cited paper , see below; (c) E Trainito/Bardo Museum; (d) Louvre Museum.

The four figures show (a) a dusky grouper, Epinephelus marginatus to show the animal in the flesh as it were. (b) A figure which makes a point the authors wish to bring out namely that groupers, particularly any remaining large ones, are no longer found in shallow waters because of overfishing. (c) A fishing scene in a Roman mosaic from Bizerte, Tunisia, 5th century CE. (d) Something similar - "Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite," Roman mosaic from Constantine, Algeria, 3rd century CE.

In their paper the authors describe the current population levels of the grouper, the fact that larger fish are now found only in deeper water and that the impact of overfishing is additionally high because groupers are protogynous hermaphrodites, a form in which the fish start out as females and change to males as they get bigger (or older depending on the organism). Now all this is interesting (and as usual for this subject somewhat depressing) but it is when they move to describing their alternative sources that we get back to the point which links it to the previous 'Shrinkage' post. In that post, photos from half a century ago were compared with modern catches or schematics to both formally assess the change in size and species present or to represent the size decine in an important food fish. Guidetti and Micheli go back a bit further. Not just half a century but twenty centuries. Their point being that the mosaics and art work of the Romans, Etruscans and Greeks (they are particularly interested in the Mediterranean basin) depicted the fishing, and the fish, as it was. Pristine, fish that could be lassoed at the surface or caught on rod and line, an abundance of large grouper, large enough perhaps to eat a person, to be called "sea monsters."

Pull the other one.

The use of photos from the recent past seems to be an interesting way to document and analyse the former size and abundance of food and sport fish and a useful method of comparison to today's meagre populations. Looking at art work from 2000 years ago to attempt the same thing might be a valiant idea, a thought showing stupendous faith in humanity, but also one that clearly did not come from fishermen. I mean really. Even if the artists that painted, drew, fired or did whatever you do to get the picture on a mosaic or amphora, weren't fishermen they would likely have asked fishermen about the success. And that is where the trouble begins. I would drop my brass monkeys if the Etruscan fisherman posed the question 'so how big are these grouper you are catching?' would not leap at the chance of a bit of heroic embellishment. Perhaps the artists visited the dock to paint from reality. I wager they would have found the fishermen pointing to the only large grouper on display and say something on the lines of 'should have been here yesterday.' The two mosaics depicted above have the whitewash of myth. The artist perhaps starting off with a reasonable sized animal eating a smaller fish. "Nah," he thinks and repaints the fish to the size it can eat a larger fish, then a porpoise, then a dolphin. Finally egged on by his assistant ("they'll never know, go on, go on") a person. And why would you expect artists to represent the reality of the catch? They don't today. All that artwork in Grays doesn't show trout at four to the pound. No. It shows heroic figures manly hanging onto a bent rod while some leviathon strips line. Nor, for example, are there many small fish depicted here.

Another somewhat darker thought arises too. These grouper, not just the dusky but other large species such as the Nassau, Goliath and Giant are slow growing. This method of sex determination and their reproductive strategy make them especially vulnerable to overfishing. It makes me wonder about ancient times. Did they really have it so pristine? How much pressure could these species had put up with? One may have heard ancient Greek fishermen singing a familiar tune to any who would listen (and many who didn't want to);

"Should have been 'ere last year Androcles. Why we 'ad those groupers jumpin' into the bleedin' boat didn't we Hormunculus. You what? Yea, too bloody right my son. Now, what with these bloody Macedonians muscling in on our waters, the fishing's gone to pot. Spear a fish? Can't even see a bloody fish mate. Bastards. With their new fangled techniques. Whatsitsname? Ey? What? A net? Yea. Netting the buggers out they are. Carnage it is really. Don't know what the world's coming to. Used to be a man could fish for a mornin' catch a couple of sixty pounders and be down the pub having a quiet carafe by lunchtime.....Bloody Macedonians...."

....and on and on. It is possible that the inefficient methods and small population size of the ancients allowed those taken to be rapidly replaced from the population out of reach of primitive gear and vessels. Still, when humans have been strongly implicated in the extinction of large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene one can't help wonder what havoc might have been reeked even if only at a local scale around the harbors of Heraklion and Brindisi.

In fact the more I think about it the more I feel that a 'response to:' is on the cards. I wonder if I can persuade a biologically literate fisherman to ~~take the blame~~ join in. Afterall Brayshaw put me up to it.

1. Guidetti, P & Micheli, F. (2011). Ancient art serving marine conservation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 9(7), 374-375.↩

Bigger better?

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:45:00 +0000

Cleaning out the streamer boxes in an attempt to consolidate all the various flies into a core small box for those quick trips one can sometimes snatch when Undercarriage doesn't dominate car possession and work can "do without you" for a few hours I was once again surprised at how far the size of the streamers I use has come.

The small black and olive ones were once big flies, not huge mind but a good standard mouthful. Now as you can see they appear tiny, their original Zoo Cougar-ish model dwarfed by the modern iteration, now called a Heifer groomer, which, as Galloup says is simply an articulated version of the old Zoo Cougar with a bit more marabou thrown at it. Both are excellent flies and fill the "chuck it out, smack it down, get it back fast," style of fishing which is a good way to explore new stretches (something I had been doing earlier in the season when I had a fly fishing life) and for moving good sized fish. Back then the largest trout I have yet seen here attached itself to the outsize black version, fought to standstill and then, as I tried to find an easier place to land the thing, quietly fell off the hook and glided away¹.

What has struck me then, as I sorted and discarded a whole bunch of flies, is how quickly these streamers have grown up. Part of the cause is that the more one gets used to hurling streamers around the more one pushes the boundary of what one considers to be a big fly. Confidence in ever larger patterns naturally comes with catching fish on them and one can carry on increasing the size, as I have, until one reaches the point at which the smaller, or at least moderate fish up to say fourteen inches, attack the fly quite rarely. The relationship between streamer size and size of the trout attacking is straight forward - fewer small trout will try to attack something that might be half their size or larger. Interestingly, and something of an aside, deciding on the size of prey item to attack might be based on some rule of thumb². Like only attacking other fish that are a third of their body length or less perhaps. For large fish this still leaves quite a size to have a go at. A twenty inch trout would still try to snaffle a seven inch underling.

All this is pretty straight forward and speculating on how fish might use a rule of thumb in feeding decision making aside, what I wonder about a little more is whether increasing the size of the fly actually selects for larger fish. That is, does a six inch streamer interest a fish more than a three inch version. This might sound a silly question. It is clear that the average size of fish caught increases with the size of lure used. But is that average bumped up because fewer smaller fish attack the lure or is it because more larger fish start to find the lure attractive. The idea we should use a big fly to catch a big fish is littered throughout the angling literature and is predicated on the idea that large trout cannot be bothered to move for anything but the largest food items, insects are way too small for these leviathans. But we have in mind a feeding fish here, one that is making those fractional cost-benefit calculations wild animals make all the time. So talking about large trout liking big food items is often done in the context of insect versus fish, crustacean or mouse but not in the context of territory and defence. The success of the slam/strip

approach, of pounding the banks is largely based on stimulating the fight/flight response. By crashing an intruder into a large trout's lie we are trying to stimulate the fight response - a violent reaction to the interloper who has the temerity to invade the large resident's personal space. So given the nature of knee jerk reactions is it really the case that such a fish would not have a whack at a three inch intruder but would at a six incher? In the hurly burly of the splat and flee can the resident leviathan make the fine tuned judgement that one is, and one is not worth the chase³? And since whacking is in the air, isn't it more like the mafia - any transgression is punishable in case it sets a precedence ("ama sorry Giuseppe, da boss says I have to whack ya even though it was only a nickels worth of cannoli"). Or something.
I wonder about these things not only because there is a hole in my head where speculating about sensible things in life should be, but also because if I'm made to carry such large streamers (because they really do turn the heads of larger fish) then I have to rethink my basic outfit. An outfit which though it errs towards a six weight (rather than the ubiquitous five weight which I used to go for) as the tool for all jobs, good for light fly as well as heavy, dry as well as wet, might have to become something heavier to cope with the size of the monstrosities I can see being used. That would not be good. The buying a new outfit thing. It would mean bearding the Unmentionable in her lair. It might mean midnight sacrifice of the vermin to appease her.
Hmm. Sacrificing vermin. Now there is a thought that slackens the noose around the scrotum of indecency.

1. Bloody barblessness. Because I have switched to large, heavy wired and heavier barbed hooks I felt it incumbent on me to crush down the barb on all my streamers. Watching a fish slide off the hook at the merest hint of slack as I scrambled along the bank to a gravel shelf did not endear me to this particular conservation minded correction of tackle. The bloody thing was nearly two feet long for chrissake.↩.
2. I haven't thought to look into rule of thumb decision making during foraging but it promises to be an interesting avenue. For example, when a simple search brings up a paper with the title "Bees in two-armed bandit situations: foraging choices and possible decision mechanisms" one can't help be enthralled by the application of such learning and decision making examples to the way of a trout with the fly. If this bores the socks of you you shouldn't be reading this blog - go away.↩.
3. As soon as I wrote that I thought - 'well yes of course they can' - which might negate the whole thought process. Except that it doesn't mean that they will. Or will not. Chase the lure that is. My head hurts.↩

Shrinkage.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:29:00 +0000

T. J. Brayshaw from the excellent blog The Angler's Culvert sent me a paper¹ a little while back that he thought I may be interested in. I was. I am. It also jogged my memory that I had seen something similar to the picture depicted. The paper T.J. sent me is about the over-fishing debate. Not that it is really a debate but the causes and consequences of the decline does provide a juicy bone for ecologists and evolutionary biologists to get their teeth into. I am not about to write one of my overlong and incredibly muddled treatise on the subject here. Rather I just want show the image this article uses and the ones T.J.'s missive nudged me to unearth again.

Photo courtesy reference 1 and see².

This photo from Palkovacs short paper is really self explanatory. The author is highlighting a consequence of overfishing - it drives the evolution of both small body size and early time to maturation. The photo above is simply a visual reminder of what has happened to the size of cod (Gadus morhua) caught from the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and Labrador. At the turn of the century cod were large. The one on the right was 5 foot 5 inches and weighed 60 pounds. By contrast the average size for the oldest age class (17 years) in 2005 was just over three feet and weighed about 18.5 pounds. It is a stark comparison, the 2005 picture scaled as it is to show the magnitude of the effect. This jogged me to remember a paper in Conservation Biology by Loren McClenachan³. Her paper describes comparisons of the size of fish caught from sport fisheries in the Florida Keys, specifically Key West, between 1957 and 2007. Once again the decline in size (and numbers in this case) is stark even though my screen grab of the image is not very good (for which apologies).

Photo courtesy reference 3.

If the juggernaut that is commercial fishing on the high seas is a little esoteric, the consequences a little hard to gather then these simple trophy pictures really bring it home. From the heady days of Hemingway through to modern times the decline in size is abundantly clear. McClenachan used the same techniques to produce another paper⁴ specifically on the globally endangered goliath grouper.

A. was taken in 1957. B. taken in 1958. C & D between 1965 and 1979. Photo courtesy reference 4.

These two illustrations are not to say that it was sport fishing's impact that caused the decline in the availability of large fish (which is actually due to a change in species caught rather than, as in the cod example above, shrinkage of the same species) but the impact that commercial fishing has had on the sport fishing, the "trophy fishing" as it is called in these examples, around the coral reefs of the Florida Keys. Mind, it is salutary to remember that in many places, here in Pennsylvania particularly, sport fishing was the reason for the decline in both 'trophy' fish and fish populations. Indeed it was likely that decline was so rapid that selection for small body size and early maturation was swamped.
It is also interesting to note that sharks and groupers (the goliath grouper above but also other large groupers such as the Nassau Grouper) had already been overfished before the earliest of these photos were taken. For sharks declines had started back in the 1930s and for Groupers a commercial fishery already existed in the 1880s. So even Zane Grey may have been chewing the stem of his pipe at an observable decline of some of the larger species even though he, and later Hemingway would have enjoyed sport the like of which no one fishing that area today could imagine.
One final point before signing off on this post. Despite the clear evidence that the size of fish caught has seriously declined (by some 88%) in the last half century costs of charters to fish in the keys has remained the same ranging from $40-48 per person (adjusted for inflation), pre day between 1956 and 2007. Well done charter captains. Or is there more to fishing than catching six foot grouper?

1. Palkovacs, E. P. (2011) The over-fishing debate: an eco-evolutionary perspective. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 26(12), 616-617.↩
2. The full picture is taken from the reference above but the old black and white with the nervous little boy is courtesy of The Rooms Provincial Archives Division of Newfoundland and Labrador (http://www.therooms.Ca/).↩
3. McClenachan, L. (2009) Documenting loss of large trophy fish from Florida Keys with historical photographs. Conservation Biology. 23(3), 636-643.↩
4. McClenachan, L. (2009) Historical declines of goliath grouper populations in South Florida, USA. Endangered Species Research. 7, 175-181.↩

Friday evening.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 02:35:00 +0000

While the barbs one's children come up with are in the air (see post below) it is worth noting that my oldest daughter (the one responsible for this post) recently commented that I was a five year old in a forty five year old's body. This was quite possibly becuase I made her read The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy which she found to be fun but a bit 'silly.' Or it may have something to do with me always having the radio on in the kitchen so I can listen to programmes like I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. I thought that it lost its way a little with the sad demise of Humph but then I also thought that after the equally lamented departure of Willie Rushton. It is, to my taste, a bit more hit or miss than it once was but when they click it is hilarious.

Uxbridge English Dictionary definitions

Vanish - Rather like a van.
Ball Bearing - The side a gentleman dresses.
Arsenal - The whole body.
Pastiche - What Sean Connery eats in Cornwall.
Module - Christmas with The Who.
Jacuzzi - French for 'I know who did that in the bath.'
Singe - What Sean Connery confesses to in church.

In this episode (the one recorded in Guildford - you've only got a couple of days to listen to it so buck up there) they hit some of the high notes of past years. Jeremy Hardy's (who notoriously cannot carry a tune) attempt to 'pick up song' when the song is 'So Lonely' by The Police (which he does in what I think is a Geordie accent) is priceless. Even the duck Spartacus works after a fashion.
There are so many in jokes, so many long running gags and so much that culturally may be impenetrable from anyone outside the UK that I have refrained from posting about the programme before. But then I dip in again and remember that it is just down right funny. So, for half an hour, feel like a five year old again after a long hard week.

Pegged

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 04:39:00 +0000

I've always hated shaving and see no reason to give a barber money for cutting my hair when I can simply get the clippers out and once done ask the Aircraft Carrier to tidy up the edges. So once every month, month and a half or so out comes said clippers and off comes the excess.
Yesterday evening daughter was sitting behind me doodling at the table. Having finished mowing I turned to her and she said,

"Ahh!"

"What?"

"You don't look like Daddy anymore."

"Oh," says I and, thinking that she will say somebody younger, more lithe, I asked, "who do I look like?"

"A fifty year old slave."

She's five. Nearly six. Where the hell did that come from?

There. See? Son of Cyclops perhaps but nothing like a fifty year old slave. Eh? What? Oh. Right, well then, pass us the toga would you old chap.

A round of golf.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:49:00 +0000

Never really seems to work. Every year in early autumn, with the agreement of the Barber Shop Quartet, I am allowed to take a couple of days off to devote myself to some fishing. No work, no domestication. Hardly ever works. Weather, travel, the depredations of large lions. This year was no exception. I had taken a whole week off to catch up on some work that didn't require me to be at work. The plan was to fish and work and fish, and fish. And then fish a bit more. Secretly, except to the Four Piece Combo who knows and sees all¹, I hoped to get three, four or even five days to myself scratching around on rivers and losing a lot of flies.

Remember that bit about "never really seems to work" and the other one about "weather?" So it goes. It tipped down at the weekend (not this one I hasten to add this was all over a month ago) and all rivers came up muddied and bilious with leaves. The waterways edged to the very lip of their banks, glared at me balefully and said "oh yea, want some of it do ya?" No, I didn't. A few days of my week leaked away as the water receded and then it blazed bright bluebird days, not the dingy, grey drizzle I was hoping for. I went fishing but strange to say my heart really wasn't in it. I did catch some fish.

Quite a few fish in the few hours I fished.

Quite a few nice fish.

Good lies were identified,

and cast to with the usual Eccles result².

But I spent more time wandering around looking at the Diptera on the berries

and at the cornucopia of berries themselves.

All this came to just two little stints of a couple of hours each and apart from the photos all that I remember is that the trout were pretty and easy. And that there were people. Not just fisher people but others. Walkers, hunters and joggers, respendent in shiny-shiny and earpod phone things.

Spring creek here in central Pennsylvania has always been popular and partly as a consequence of this, is a long way from my favourite creek. But it is close and convenient, a short trip from home and a stone's throw from work. During my summer absence the powers that be have sent in the bulldozers and created both a wide graveled lane, running for perhaps half a mile along the stream, and the new parking lot you see above. How many cars will it hold? Twenty, thirty? I look at this (and the nice new information booth) with some horror. Imagine what it will look like next spring when the sulphurs are hatching. I have only fished the hatch once on this creek and then it was a matter of inserting myself into the stream like a book slid back onto an already full bookshelf. Not all the parked cars will contain fishermen i suppose. Two of these held bow hunters, the season having just started. Another one held the aforementioned jogger. Yet the attitude, that more space for cars and people is needed here, grinds.

As I said Spring Creek is not my favourite stream in part because of the pressure and in part for other reasons³. This new car park adds to a burgeoning view of fly fishing as just another sort of golf⁴, a pastime used to accessorise a lifestyle. Its commonness, its ubiquity⁵ and acceptance as a legitimate exercise confront a view of the quirky, offbeat hobby (if it ever was here anyway) Gierach liked to portray it as. Both are ultimately pointless. Both involve 'getting outside for a bit.' Both are rife with arcane language and gadgets. Both are upwardly mobile. Both can induce obsessional, driven behaviour. And both can result in a kind of myopic, protective view of the sport to the exclusion of a wider panorama. The golfer who once extolled to me the environmental credentials of golf courses was blind to the reality of the wasteland so many of these places actually represent. The angler who derides the impact of dams on the one hand and extols the world class fishery they create on the other. That fish other than salmonids are caught up in the process is hardly every mentioned⁶.

Ah well. It's not the fishing. I am still keen on the fishing. In fact I have the urge to go right now. Except I can't. Work. Children. Rain. And as I may have mentioned before the depredations of large lions. If I didn't know better it would start to sound like a conspiracy.

1. "Her gaze pierces cloud, shadow, earth, and flesh. You know of what I speak, readers: a great Eye, lidless, wreathed in flame." It's true. Or something remarkably close. Especially when I get back late from fishing, traipse mud all over the kitchen and overexcite the children.↩
2. Oh come on. That is award winning misjudgment. It's not as though this was caught up on the back cast. I left it eight feet up in front of me. Some skill.↩
3. I've been meaning to post on this area for some time. Suffice it to say that fishing Spring Creek is like dipping your toe in the process of domestication. It is not like breaking mustangs (I assume) but more like looking at the bovine process of prodding cattle.↩
4. There have been lots of good quotes about golf, good walk spoiled and all that, as long as they haven't been said by golfers. Recently I came across one by P. J. O'Rourke (who deserves a Random Quote post himself). About golf he apparently said "Golf combines two favourite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with sticks."↩
5. Everyone is at it. The dad of my daughter's friend. My dentist. The other professor. That other professor. And that one. The husband of the women who looks after the insects. The guy who came to give a quote on the roof ("did you get on the green drakes this year?"). That annoying undergraduate. They're not only all at fishing they are all at fly fishing.↩
6. Take the Pikeminnow for example. A bounty on the Northern Pikeminnow in the Snake/Columbia river system because of their well documented taste for migrating salmonids is a result of dams supposedly improving habitat for them and causing a decline in the predator escape response of the migrants. Further south the Colorado Pikeminnow is, and has been for over a decade, the subject of an extensive restoration programme. Why? Because the dams that create the famous and much lauded tailwater fisheries in the San Juan and Colorado rivers block the long distance migration this species performs to reach spawning sites. The full story simply drips with irony.↩

IOT Archive

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:38:00 +0000

I never even knew it existed. The trouble with moving iTunes libraries around is that it seems to lose (though they say it doesn't) some of the archived podcasts I religiously download. So my collection, and in particular the full back catalogue of one marvelous programme, is incomplete.

What programme? Is he blathering on about the wireless again? And why can't he spell program?

I have mentioned In Our Time on a number of occasions - it is BBC radio programming at its most consistently top notch. While doing an irregular check on whether the Beeb had updated or made any new programmes available I was delighted to find 'IOT Archives.' Fantastic. All the way back to the programmes inception in 1998. Yet there did seem to be some missing. Where was the programme on 'Origins of Infectious Disease' or the one on 'Wyclif and the Lollards?' A little more hunting revealed the rest. The Beeb, in all its wisdom, has categorised them into History, Science, Culture, Philosophy and Religion and they are easily accessible through the BBC's own IOT website or through iTunes. In all more than five hundred programmes and sixteen days of listening. This I hasten to add is not simply a recommendation on the amount there is to listen to but much more on the quality. They really are excellent. Try them! Try them! And you may [like them]. Try them and you may I say.

PS. Ooh look it's even got a programme on "Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment."

Colour me still curious

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:46:00 +0000

Research on colour and its perception, which was the subject of a BBC programme and a couple of posts, still has me fascinated. Downloading the TED Talks app the other day and looking around for a good talk I found that Beau Lotto, who featured in that BBC programme, had given a TED talk. Once again it is fascinating stuff. He starts with a simple and by now well documented example, that of how our colour perception is changed by the background context. I say this is well documented because even artists¹ have cogitated on this curiosity for some time.

The German born, Bauhaus trained, late Yale professor Josef Albers apart from producing a monumental "Homage to the square" series of paintings was also curious about how colours were perceived when placed against different backgrounds².

These are just two of the many images he created and of course both the small brown squares in the top picture are the same brown and the small green squares in the bottom picture are both the same green. It is the background that is affecting our perception and making us think they are different.

Lotto's second example is equally good and coming from where I do rather a nice example of an oft heard criticism of evolution³. The simple point, that increasing visual acuity, as he says the difference between the "amount" of light and the "quality" of light, radically changes our perception and, specifically in his example but more generally too, increases our survival chances and hence our reproductive success.

The talk, annoyingly short as all good TED Talks are, is well worth a view as there are a number of other interesting examples and ideas. He reaches a bit in places. The colour-to-music and the colour-as-a-tool I find, at least as presented, less than convincing. On one hand the choice of which note (tone, sound, crotchet, minim) to attach to a particular colour seems entirely arbitrary and a completely different tune may arise if the assignments are changed. Further, I don't see how using the colour of an object is different to simply using sonar. Good sonar can build a 'visual' image made by the sound waves (3D foetal imaging for example). Colour could probably do the same job but it remains to be seen whether it would do it better.

There is more fishing coming up in future posts though I grant that (...oh man....⁴) there hasn't been much evidence of that recently. The colour and vision thing is interesting in this context. Much thought and opinion (not least on this blog) is given to how fish see and how the perceive and identify food items. Opinions may differ over some aspects but in general we think we have a fairly good model for understanding how fish see. And then up comes some damned researcher and points out that what we see isn' really what is there. I am not sure it affects how we think fish see at all. But it is food for thought.

1. That may be a bit harsh on artists and I haven't read Albers book, but though artists, like philosophers, may walk around a phenomenon, bend at the knees, lean over to change the angle, frame the subject with their fingers, it takes a proper scientist to dive straight in with well designed, well controlled experiments to actually unpick what is going on. Some do not like this thought and are happy living with ignorance and hey diddle diddle we get back to Newton and Keats. But there you go.↩
2. Albers produced a book about this and other colour phenomenon, 'Interaction of Color.'↩
3. The eye is often used by IDiot proponents as an example of why evolution cannot work - "how can something so complex come into being" or another favourite "what is the use of half an eye?" If the black jaguar in Lotto's example had moved across a patch of light in the black and white image we would have seen it and be forewarned. But if Lotto had another image that was totally black, i.e. we couldn't see at all, we would never see the jaguar whether it moved or not. Being able to perceive some light differences is not as good as full colour perception of course (we would be eaten more times) but clearly it is better than seeing nothing (we would be eaten all the time). And this is what selection acts on - those with better vision (however incrementally) find food and avoid predators better and so survive and those that haven't don't. I told you they were IDiots.↩
4. Sorry but I was listening to some stuff in the background and completely unexpectedly The Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs came on. Great track. Er, sorry.↩

Dang, after all the above I forgot to add in the actual talk. Here you go.

Random Quotes XX

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:18:00 +0000

I feel I may have to devote a different series to this. So many of the entries in Michael Bywater's Lost Worlds (if you want to have a look at a previous entry and learn more about the book look here) are eminently suitable to this post category that it perhaps deserves one of its own - what does Bywater have to say this week?
Well not yet. At the risk of infringing whatever arcane copyright law that exists to say how much of a particular work one can quote verbatim, here is another (with another one or two lined up already).

I grew up in a household that did a bit of old chapping. Not a huge amount it has to be said, if you want to know the truth about old chappery you need to understand that it was done betwen two more or less equals. Certainly not to the help. Of course we youngsters never old chapped anyone. No, that would have been wrong as young chaps do not as a rule old chap other young chaps. And young chaps certainly never old chapped older chaps. Heaven forefend. That sort of thing is left to the older chaps, particularly those who have just come into their old chappery but haven't yet got bored of the idea and dropped it for more serious name calling. Like 'your grace,' or 'Sire,' or 'your highness.' Now having grown to the age where old chapping is allowable I find I have moved away from the circles in which it might be appropriate. Never mind, it is a latent force still¹.

Chap, Old.
An oddity, Old Chap; a curiously English construction, suggesting intimacy without actually suggesting intimacy. You can see why the English would need such an honorific.
To call a man 'old chap' was shorthand for what would otherwise take far too long to express. But we can try. What it, at least in part meant was:
'What I am about to say presumes upon our acquaintance to the extent that to address you as MISTER² whatever-it-is would be unbecomingly stuffy. Yet I do not wish to embarrass you with a self-conscious use of your first name. The matter that I am about to raise also temporarily (it may even be permanently, but I do not want to assume that) obliterates any fine gradations of rank or differences in income between us, yet although I am addressing you as what might, to Johnny Foreigner, appear to be an equal, I am nonetheless retaining the upper hand in the conversation which is to follow. I am probably going to give you some advice, which you may find unpalatable; alternatively I may be about to make light of something which you find serious to the point of being unbearable; or it may be that I am about to give you bad news, and my old-chappery is an indication that, while I am obviously sympathetic to your plight, I most certainly do not feel your pain, and I would be frightfully obliged if you could at least give the impression of not feeling it either, or we may face the possibility of embarrassment. Whether I have been having regular and passionate sex with your wife, leading her to heights of gratification which she never experienced beneath your clumsily uxorious advances; whether I have been advised by your commander-in-chief to suggest that suicide is your only honourable course; whether I am about to tell you that you have CANCER: the fact that I am preceding it with an old-chapping (and possibly sprinkling some further old-chappery in the conversational interstices) is advance warning that you must neither show feelings or use pronouns in what follows. That is to say you must not say 'I take you point.' No no no. That 'I' is far to intimate and makes it somehow ... well, personal. You must say, 'Hmm. Take your point,' or better still, 'Point taken old chap.'Do you see what I am driving at, old chap? Course you do. Good show.'
How the hell can we say that, now that 'old chap' has been for ever lost? We can't. And so we don't. Instead we go in for all sorts of un-Englishness - first names, sharing, emotional honesty, hugging, stuff bordering on intimacy - and then we wonder why Johnny Foreigner no longer looks up to us and the world is going to hell. Bad show. Blame the women. And that dashed Viennese fellow, said everyone wanted to have a pop at his MOTHER, you know the fellow, trick cyclist, jabber jabber, dreams, cigars, face dropped off, won't do old chap; won't do at all. Thin end of the wedge. Do you know what I think, old chap ... hello? Hello? Are you there? Hello ...?

1. It naturally occurs to me that many Americans (and for that matter most modern English bods) won't have a clue what I and Bywater are going on about. Which I suppose just goes to prove the 'lost' point. Tant pis!↩
2. Bywater uses bold caps to indicate when the word or phrase highlighted is deserving of its own entry in the book. Hence MISTER ("'Mister' alone is either a petition or incipient threat"), CANCER ("Now that things have got so much better it is quite hard to die of anything else, cancer is all the fashion.") and MOTHER ("Mothers were Authority.") all do. Look I am not about to write down the whole entry for each of these three - what do you think I am a bloody plagiarist? Go and buy the book yourself you damn skinflints.↩

It's how we move stupid.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 04:15:00 +0000

A couple of really good posts have been put up on the blogosphere concerning ethics and such like, both garnering numbers of interesting comments. Anyone dropping in here should have a look at Erin's post and T.J. Brayshaw's over at The Angler's Culvert a blog which, for some unknown reason, I haven't, but should have, put on my own blog roll thing. The ethical concerns regarding fishing are something I have been interested in for some time and filters into some of my own blog posts here and there.

That is the housekeeping du jour. I have been swamped at work and domestically and as a result, for really the first time this year, I haven't posted for over a month. Naughty Eccles. As is the way with busyness I have therefore been unable to commit much in the way of heinous fishing acts - but I have been running .....mental stumble....What, Eccles, running? Indeed. And while collecting aches and ticks I have rediscovered something that I haven't thought about for nearly two decades. Maybe more on that another time but for now it did make this video that much more pertinent. Perhaps. It is a fascinating talk anyway so even if I were still inhaling the product of a burning Gauloise from the very deep depths of the couch I would still have been glued to the screen.

The neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert gives an excellent presentation in this TED talk about his idea that the brain evolved to deal with movement. No. NO! Not to think, not to esoterically solve complex problems but just (just!) to facilitate the incredibly complex process of moving. He illustrates the development of his ideas with the experiments used to test them and packs a lot into the less than twenty minutes he has. It is excellent stuff and I now know, from an astonishing little video, what the hell cup stacking is.

I can already hear those who would have a more 'spiritual' rationale for our brain evolution, some wishy-washy explanation based on feelings ("the dreaming, the yearning, the falling in love" as the moderator asks) and the like. I don't have much truck with the latter efforts to trivialise Wolperts thesis with arm waving but that doesn't mean that his ideas shouldn't be scrutinised. One aspect I can think of is, if the hypothesis is true, we should find that other large brained animals exhibit the need for complex and dextrous movement. Dolphins come to mind. Are they really dextrous?

Random Quotes XIX

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:59:00 +0000

I'm partial to a bit of Radiohead myself but to post a video it has to have something a little more than a good band crooning methinks. Here is Thom Yorke singing 'No Surprises' from the 1997 album 'OK Computer'. Strange set up to begin with (but hey its a music video - its, like, art you know man) and then you notice the rising water. Sod the crooning what is going on here? He is under for around a minute and after just 30 seconds I am getting twitchy glancing from his fixed aquatic stare to the top of the frame to see if the water is receding. At forty five seconds I am getting really uneasy. This despite knowing there will be nothing wrong or even that the video is manipulated so that he was really under there for only half the time. Or something. Doesn't matter it drags a feeling out of you - which is the whole point I suppose. What it has to do with the lyrics of the song I have no idea. But then it is a music video. Oh, and the look of triumph on his face after the tide recedes is priceless.

The lunar module and the other.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:00:00 +0000

“One thing I am looking forward to as I grow older is the fun I can have with all the boys who come to take my daughter out on dates.” Frederick Menteur, 1971.

“Is that you? Let the vermin out will you? Oh my. Well. You’ve certainly changed. A lot. You’ve got more hair. And you’re bigger. And, if I am not mistaken you’ve also changed sex. Weren’t you female last time we met?”
“Hello Mr Eccles…..”
“You know this won’t do at all, you can’t just flipflop between one and the other on a whim, just like that, not a thought for where you are going and how you are going to get there….”
“Er, Mr Eccles…..”
“Anyone would think you were a whelk or something, changing sex at the drop of a hat. I mean, s’not easy you know, being, well, male. You’ll have to learn to stand up and do it. Pee that is. And wipe the rim afterwards. Was it whelks? Come to think of it it might have been winkles. Or barnacles. All that hanging around on the bottom of boats. Bound to start something off. Have you been hanging around on the bottom of boats?”
“Hi Dad.”
“Hello No. 1 female offspring. I was just telling this male form of yourself that she’ll - he’ll - have to shape up a bit, stop all this imposex and decide on pattern baldness or pmt. Not easy I know but it is time he started to face these difficult challenges in life. Got any wine gums?”
“Dad!”
“Yes my little sputnik?”
“Will you stop for a minute!”
“I have. Stopped. Dead. In my tracks. For a minute. Maybe more if your extra especially nice to me. That is why you were able to say “will you stop a minute!” I was just about to tell male satellite here…”
“Dad!”
“Yes.”
“This is John.”
“Hello Mr Eccles.”
“Oh good, good. Thought my little orbital craft had started to clone herself off for a moment there. Always threatening to do it you know. Upstairs in her lab. Had to stop her running wires down from the weather vane the other day. Bloody dangerous. And I don’t care whether it would have reanimated the dachshund, think of the scorch marks she would have made on her mothers best dissecting table. Wouldn’t have found No. 2 daughter up to this kind of thing would you now.”
“Dad, she was the reason the dog needed reanimation.”
“Yes, well, accident I’m sure. Don’t know where she found that pitchfork, Geoff is it?”
“Er, no it’s John.”
“Are you sure?” Looks him slowly up and down and then says to daughter, “It was Whelks. Dog Whelks. Females growing willies. Strange.” Looking back at John, “More like a Herbert, spotty, spotty Herbert. Yes. Anyone call you that? No? Really? Hard to believe. You look just like a spotty Herbert. Not Hubert of course, he stood on one leg and ate worms. Pretending to be a bird you see. You don’t have avian tendencies do you - don’t go in for a bit of the Ratite’s? No? What about Palmistry then, some Phrenology? Everyone does it now I gather outside calipers are sales tax exempt. I see you looking quizzically at me. I can do you a nice line in fortune telling if I could just shave your head and have a quick grope. Might alleviate the puzzlement. Here, are those shoelaces undone? That is clever. The way you’ve managed to get them to lie just so on the floor. Very artistic. I was only saying to the International Space Station the other day what a good idea it would be to hook up with someone who has a bit of flair. House trained is he or do I have to get the newspaper out? It’s not a problem but even the bloody vermin are house trained. And can tie their own shoelaces. Though I suppose they prefer those suede slip on numbers most of the time - it’s the fur effect that does it.”
“He was just kindly walking me home Dad.”
“Really. Really. Hmm. C & R then - not a Keeper.”
Daughter, resigned, slumps against the wall. “Bloody C and K at this rate.”
“Oh that’s good. Cucumbers could do with a bit of a boost.”
“Well I’ll be getting off then,” John says.
“I say, language young man. Honestly my little piece of space debris I would have thought you could have brought someone home who wouldn’t stoop to such filthy innuendo. At least not in front of a parent. If you want to jump my daughter Ernie, just come out and ask. Stop all these silly euphemisms for God’s sake. You’ll be demanding to go to the rest room soon.
“No, no Mr Eccles, I didn’t mean to…..”
“Dad, will you stop it.”
“I will if he will. Bringing filthy sex talk into the house on a Tuesday. Simply not done. Now me and your mother…”
“John, thanks for walking me home, see you tomorrow.”
“…would have been at it like rabbits on a Wednesday and as for…..”
“Oh, er, yea, bye. Bye Mr Eccles.”
“Toodle pip old son. Nice to have met you at last. Velcro’s what you need.”
“You got any wine gums then? The long one with C-H-A-M-P-A-G-N-E written on the top?”

All this talk of pike...

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 09:00:00 +0000

...has brought to mind this.

The fish, caught in Holland in 2004 by Ewout Blom is not a record. At 42lbs it is short of both the US and the British record by four pounds and short of the world record by thirteen. But these sort of measures don't really matter, it is the image that counts. You don't often see a photo of a pike taken at this angle and when it is you are suddenly struck by the sheer tonnage of flesh on display. I mean just look how broad, just how BIG it is. Fancy hooking that on a nine weight!

Form, function and variation

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 01:10:00 +0000

“Horsey Mere, scene of the capture of England’s largest authentic rod-caught pike, lies fringed with immense reed beds in its 300 acres of remoteness just a mile or so inland from the desolate north Norfolk coast. Its pike are of the the big-skulled variety and exemplify the variability of the species Esox lucius. The characteristic of large-headedness may have evolved over thousands of years to enable Broad pike to cope more effectively with the deep-bodied bream which share its habitat.”¹

Thus wrote Fred Buller the author, among other fishing works, of the much loved Doomsday Book of Mammoth Pike. This particular entry was significant for me not only because it was about Peter Hancock’s then record pike of 40lb 1oz - any big pike is a thing of remark particularly to a young lad - but also because of the idea that pike might be adaptable, that their form might depend on what they prey on. Could this be some Lamarckian² interpretation or is there something more fundamental going on?

The reason put forward for there being big-headed pike is really quite plausible. In many lakes, particular low lying eutrophic meres such as the Norfolk Broads much of a pike’s food will be made up of the large bodied bream. These are not the bream of the south, of Alabama where bream might generically indicate a sunfish. This is Abramis brama, the common or bronze bream. It is a coarse fishing quarry and can grow large³ looking even more so because of the depth of its body. It is this body depth which any predator has to cope with as bream are otherwise undefended and not particular lithe on their fins (catching a reasonable sized specimen has been likened to reeling in a dustbin lid). So far from some Larmarckian concept the environment seems to have selected a pike phenotype with a big mouth and wide gape the better to engulf these large bodied grazers.
Buller’s description above piqued my interest because it suggested a difference in form between members of the same species that wasn't simply based on colour. Colour differences are commonly remarked on when comparing two of the same. Indeed one of my not so distant relations had a number of animals named after him as he plodded around the Raj cataloging various bits of the continent's natural history. At the time (19th century) differences in coat colour could be used to promote an individual to a new species. Now more stringent criteria are required for the elevation of a "morph" to a new species but back then my relative thought that the differences he saw were large enough to warrant such elevation whereas most of what he saw was simply the variation one species can exhibit depending on the type of environment it happens to live in. And so the Eccles voluminous rat-faced bat, distinguished by the mantle of (appropriately) whiskey coloured hair around its nape returned to being simply a colour variant of the bog standard voluminous rat-faced bat.

Colour variation in trout has been well documented for some time (and led in a similar manner to the splitting of brown trout into many different “species”) and the variation is easy to see between waters and even from the same water at times. These two brook trout were caught last year in Canada. The dark one came from a gloomy, peaty creek connecting two deep, dark lakes.

The lighter one came from a larger river whose bottom was made up of mostly light gravels. An example from closer to home came this year from my local river. Colour variation itself is interesting but not that exciting. It is a very plastic trait with many fish, including trout, able to change colour, or at least vary the tone of their basic pattern, quite rapidly. What is much more interesting is the local adaptation in something like feeding behaviour as in the putative pike example above. I have often wondered whether prey specialisation leads to clear differences in form both within a species and within a discrete population. For example one might imagine a crayfish feeding trout. These prey are highly rewarding being both big and full of nutrition. The drawback is that crayfish are pretty well tooled up, actively defend themselves and are a tad difficult to eat. That this doesn’t stop fish attacking them is obvious though the extent to which they can cope with the spines and knobbly bits still surprises me. Last year cleaning a mess of fish the children and I had caught I was continually spiked by crayfish carapaces through the stomach wall of the bass. It hurt. How do they cope with it?
Successful crayfish catching would seem to need if not exclusive changes then at least some adaptations that increase the chance of catching the formidable crustacean. These adaptations might be behavioural, how to approach, sneak up on, attack and deal with the little buggers, but also may involve some morphological contribution too, better ways of engulfing and crushing the animal before it can use those claws. A large mouth or buccal cavity and larger jaw muscles might be beneficial.
Noticing these differences (if they exist) is difficult. We catch a fish unhook it and after a brief admiring glance release the animal. We may hold onto it a bit longer if it is big, take a few photos, but I don’t know anyone who would start to take eye:snout, lateral line, gape width measurements. We might, every now and then hold the fish up to our rod to note its total length but that really tell us nothing about how it might live differently to conspecifics.

Still they are there and not long ago I came across a paper which looked at and discussed the, hold your breath here, “phenotypic plasticity, heterochrony and ontogenetic repatterning during juvenile development of divergent Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus⁴).” And exhale. The paper investigates charr populations in two different lakes in Iceland. In fact this paper builds on a number of other papers investigating this subject, I am just using as the jumping off point. One of the lakes is large (84 km²) structurally complex and deep. The other is small (7 km²) shallow with a uniform muddy bottom. One would think that the greater the complexity the water has the more opportunity there is for adaptation to particular niches. As might be expected, if you thought about this at all, the large lake has four identified ecomorphs; a small benthivore, a large benthivore, and two limnetic⁵ ecomorphs; one piscivore and a planktivore. Somewhere in the time since the last ice age and the recolonisation of these waters by charr this diversity has developed. But it is not only the large structurally diverse lake where different ecomorphs can be found. The small lake has two, subtly divergent, forms which I’ll mention again later. The larger lake, Thingvallavatn, has received considerable research attention and there is even a beautiful plate of the different ecomorphs from an earlier paper⁶ summarising findings on the four ecomorphs;

which is rather nice as it saves me explaining them in detail. The differences have a lot to do with foraging behaviour and the selective advantage each has for different prey types. The small benthivore (top in the picture) executes small snails, the large benthivore (2nd from top) large snails, the small limnetic (2nd from bottom and planktivore in the caption) eats zooplankton and the large limnetic charr (bottom and piscivore in the caption) scoffs three-spined stickleback and other charr. At certain time of the year all forms will forage for the same prey items during super abundance of invertebrates - think spring hatches. It is a beautiful example of phenotypic variation (driven by diet specialisation perhaps) which may well lead to incipient speciation. In the smaller lake I mentioned, the one with less diverse surroundings, the two ecomorphs are still associated with different diets, swimming performance and maneuverability though here there is more overlap and the “segregation of prey types is seasonal.” This isn’t surprising as the lake is smaller, shallower and less structurally diverse. The extent to which I am not well read on this subject and the extent to which I have given it little thought is shown by the fact that even a cursory squint at the literature reveals there are feeding based ecomorphs for Bluegills and Pumpkinseeds, Sticklebacks and Lake trout.
Another wrinkle to add to this clear diversity in form and function is the personality of the fish⁷. Now I don’t wish to go into that here because it is a subject worthy of its own post or two but suffice to say if you happen to be a “bold” fish it may make you respond to, say, bait fish more aggressively. Since learning is probably an important component of specialisation this would then act to reinforce diet choice. A “shy” fish on the other hand, rarely venturing out into the wide blue yonder, might easily bump into a snail or caddis, something a bit more sedentary, well armoured and difficult to get at in all the crevices and niches. But it is much more complicated because personality traits are likely independent of foraging phenotypes and so the small benthivore will have shy and bold individuals as will the large limnetic piscivore.
I love the idea that I could be fishing over this diversity. That to catch a certain fish (seen or only imagined) I might have to fish hard and carefully with a particular pattern, a pattern that the fish has developed to being a specialist in foraging for, snails, cased caddis, crayfish, agile darters, black nosed dace. While it is debatable whether an individual fish can get all its nutritional requirements this way the evidence from the charr suggest that such dietary specialisation doesn’t have to occur exclusively - abundant but ephemeral food items can be exploited before returning to the usual fare. That this diversity has within it a complex interaction with the behavioural trait (and may even be caused by this trait) of the fish is even more fascinating.

But there is a down side here. Much as I like to think there is such diversity and complex biology going on out there in front of me as I stand on the river bank it is quite likely there is not in most cases. It is likely that the fish population I aim a fly at is as homogeneous as a McDonalds hamburger. Diversity needs time, stability, a certain steadiness in the pattern of ebb and flow. We having extirpated much of what we found in front of us replacing it with what superficially looks the same but is not. Most fishermen well know that a hatchery trout is different to a wild fish. Different in both form and behavioural function. However even stocked populations gone wild will struggle to scrape the surface of the diversity shown in the simple picture above. There are much more insidious consequence too. If diversity is not replaced or allowed to develop (and this applies to stocking, re-stocking, fingerling stocking - in fact pretty much any population augmentation I can think of), if the rivers are populated with homogeneous trout, then we suffer the risks that any inflexible and brittle population suffers. Imagine that three of the ecomorphs in the picture above were lost from the lake - overfished for example - and only the limnetic piscivore was left. One morph has to be careful, a simple perturbation might cause havoc, a disease sweeping through the stickleback population. With all four morphs present the loss would not be as keen, keenly felt by the piscivore no doubt, but there would still be charr in the lake and likely the diversity for a large piscivore morph to re-emerge. This cannot happen if there is no diversity.
We look on similarities, on the supermarket shelves, in the shopping arcades and malls, in the way we use bobber and nymph, as a safety net. We can find what we want wherever we are, at whatever time we want it. But it isn’t really a safety net. The lack of diversity, the monotonic process might very well be the noose that hangs us, there is no environmental or intellectual buffer. To be honest it is these thoughts that make a small part of me shiver. It makes a diminutive part of myself not want to string a rod and tacitly be a part of the continuing impact, by deed and attitude, of a pastime that talks a good game but plays a poor one. It is only a small part and accentuated in the long nights by the fact I can no longer reach for the calming tobacco. But it is there nevertheless.

1. Buller F. (1979). The Doomsday Book of Mammoth Pike. Stanley Paul and Co. London. It it both a strange and marvelous book. Strange because of the amount of time Buller dedicated to collecting all the material and marvelous because it contains stories of huge pike.↩
2. I am sure you don’t need an essay on Lamarckianism here but just so we are reading off the same hymn sheet it was that idea that traits acquired during a lifetime could be passed onto offspring. You know the thing, lumberjack develops large biceps because of all that wood felling (no not dressing up in women’s clothing) and so lumberjack’s son will have large biceps. As a theory it fell apart with Darwin, Mendel and the modern evolutionary synthesis. Which is at it should be - except those darned epigeneticists are starting to talk about it again in terms of behaviour. Interesting.↩
3. The current UK record bream is over 20lbs.↩
4. Parsons, K. J. et al. (2011) Phenotypic plasticity, heterochrony and ontogenetic repatterning during juvenile development of divergent Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus). Journal of Evolutionary Biology, early edition, 13 pp.↩
5. A benthivore is a fish that feeds mainly on and around the lake or river bed whereas a limnetic fish feeds in the open water.↩
6. Sandlund, O. T. et al. (1992) The Arctic Charr, Salvlinus alpinus in Thingvallavatn. Oikos, 64, 305-351.↩
7. Yes tricky to talk about personalities in fish. The fact that it is Personal-ities would seem to preclude its use for anything other than people. Still it is, if not quite a formal term, one that is commonly used in the literature. Others have shied away from it and use "behavioural traits" or "behavioural syndromes" to describe shy or bold, aggresive or timid, or any other continuum of behavioural characteristics. In this there is no substitute - being shy is the same whether the animal is human or fish.↩

A little extra on colour.

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 02:22:00 +0000

There was something in the video from the last post that has been nagging me a little. The short introductory section where the narrator and researcher talk about infants pre-language and toddlers with language. Colour vision develops in babies after about three months and talking after ...... well that is a loaded question. A year, two for sentences? And before that children certainly understand some words so does that count? Say "where is the red bus" and the link between the word red and the colour we perceive has presumably been made even though the child may not be able to say "red bus."

The researcher in this segment said " .. colour categories present in infants even before they've learnt the words for colour. So somehow infants are also dividing up the spectrum of colour into categories even through they don't have the language to tell them how to do that."

There are, at the most parsimonious, a few months where children have fully functioning colour vision and no language to influence the perception of the colours they see. So what do they see? And is this some sort of ancestral condition, a view of the world that other animals, those without language but with visual systems that overlap ours, perceive? Before, in our case it is screwed up by culture and language.

And if that is the case can we get babies to look at mayflies and tie some imitations for us?

What's your colour?

noreply@blogger.com (Eccles) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 04:02:00 +0000

This is a fascinating documentary and the excerpt below especially so. Have a gander at this.

Lifted from a BBC Horizon programme¹ there are a couple of aspects of this piece that are immediately striking. The first is that pre-language children process colour with the left side of the brain but on the acquisition of language switch c.p.u.s to the right side - language might actually dictate what colour we see. The second, following on from the latter, is the astonishing demonstration of this observation beautifully illustrated in this video segment. The Himba² have different ways of verbally characterising colour (five colours instead of our eleven) and this affects how they see colour. I have rarely seen such a thorough demonstration of what, at first blush, would seem to be a relatively abstract concept, as the the twelve card test the researcher performs. It is difficult to distinguish the green amongst the other greens and easy to see the blue. Yet the Himba see it so differently, jumping quickly to the former and seemingly failing with the latter. I followed up a reference to the Russians after watching this video.³

The Russian language doesn't do "blue"⁴. They have a word for the lighter blues ("goluboy") and the darker blues ("siniy") and it has been shown that differences exist in the perception of blues between Russian speakers and English speakers⁵. This difference may be more subtle than between the Himba and us but the Russkies, gawd bless 'em, are honorary Euros at least, not that different. It makes you think. The Chinese fellow and his wife who came round for lunch bringing their delightful little bundle of energy (who our youngest bundle of filed down teeth and sharpened nails has hit it off with - I was prepared to apologies profusely if ours saw theirs as nothing more than lunch) might have looked in askance at me should I have said we are painting the living room green. He envisaging a darker shade of taupe simply because cantonese accretes green and taupe into one easily digestible colour "Xiaungdo"⁶. And more, the Welsh, it turns out, didn't even have words for pink or brown until recently. What the hell did they do with all that mud littering their place. Boyo.
What you may ask is the fishing significance of all this. I can tell you, it is, as Wilde said, susceptible readily of an explanation. I don't know. I did like the fact that pre-language children do deal with colour. This might suggest that they are also able to, through experience, use colour to discriminate - edible and inedible for example - which clearly has implications for our finny friends. I haven't notice many fish engaging in lively conversation. Aside from that it really was a fly tying thing. Accompanying the rather fine gift I talk about in the post immediately below was a note part of which read, "take the dubbing out of the bags and eyeball in direct sunlight, it will make a difference." Well it did for sure but did it make the same difference to the writer of that note as it did for me? Does Mikhail Skopets choose and categorise colours on his flies in the same way I do? Who knows?

More broadly this whole area of cognitive trickery is fascinating. As Bywater says; "More than that though, our whole construction of the world, which we suppose to be based on rationale empiricism, is arguably one model among many, and based as much on anatomical happenstance as on any response to even partial 'reality." 'The brain shields us from seeing the woman in the gorilla suit beating her chest. We perceive time differently depending on whether we are surrounded by red or blue. We think the cats we own are just waiting for a moment of inattention so they can hack our ears of and string 'em into a necklace⁷. We see green instead of blue depending on the way our language categorizes colour. As the one of the researchers says at the beginning of the full programme "...colour is an illusion. An illusion that helps us to see the world in a way that's useful to see." Westerners, Himba and honey bees live each in a different reality which clearly begs the question, is there a real world at all?

1. Someone has kindly ripped off the BBC and put the whole program me up on Youtube. Here are the four episodes they made 1. 2. 3. and 4.↩
2. The Himba are a tribe from Namibia as the video says, an area close to which I did some fieldwork in what feels like a number of lifetimes ago. What brings it back is not the place depicted so much as the beginning image of that segment - the armored bush cricket. At night we used to get these things crawling over our heads in their lugubrious way as we camped out on an old abandoned farm house stoop. Pick them up wrong and they pack a nasty nip but they do make a fantastically satisfying splat when hurled against anything immovable.↩
3. Winawer, J. et al. (2007) Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. PNAS, 104, 7780-7785.↩
4. A nice bit in the beginning of the paper cited in the previous footnote goes like this; "There is no generic word for "blue" in Russian that can adequately describe all of the colors in Fig 1. (nor to adequately translate the title of this work from English to Russian)". The Fig 1 mentioned is the one above with all the blues. It begins to make you wonder where does it stop? How can you have a conversation with someone who has a different mother tongue and be sure that any reference to a colour is meaningful.↩
5. The knives and forks jumped on this. Being a geographer and currently on a project looking at how people interpret maps the obvious question is do you see the light blue lake and surrounding light green grassland in the same way I do? The Himba wouldn't.↩
6. Yea I just made that up - hope it doesn't really mean something...I'll get my hat and coat.↩
7. Well at least that is unambiguous. You can, if you are quiet, listen to them sharpening their knives during the night. Down there somewhere in the dark eating clementines and talking softly about the Balkans.↩