Putting food by...

(This was written back in July, 2004--I will be making more blueberry melomel in a couple of weeks.)


Putting food by...

Today is blueberry melomel day--25 pounds of honey (about 50 million bee-flower connections), around 20 pounds of local blueberries (and a few homegrown berries tossed in for good measure), yeast, and water will join together in a love feast that will result in a few billion yeastie babies, some ethanol, lots of carbon dioxide, and a piece of summer for family and friends to drink when the days grow too short for me to function.

Putting food by...

Your great-grandparents more likely than not knew how to put food by--save the summer surplus for the long days of winter. Drying and fermentation were the earliest methods known. The freezer is a recent invention, and according to the United Nations, 20% of the world still does not have access to electricity (as of 2002).

I hardly put away enough to survive a week, and the stuff I put by is more for selfish, simple pleasures than for any true need. Still, it's an art, one that takes time to learn, and one worth knowing.

If I want blueberry melomel (in any season), I have to make it myself. And I want it. If you had some, you'd likely want it, too.

Putting food by...

I read a haunting story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine 3 years ago July. Hyder Akbar, an Afghani translator, served as Abdul Wali's translator. Mr. Akbar's father is a governor in Afghanistan; Mr. Akbar grew up in the States.

Mr. Wali was asked questions about a rocket attack. He had come to Mr. Akbar's father's office, knowing the American wanted to question him. He told the governor he was innocent, and that he was frightened. The governor told Mr. Wali to go to the Americans, and his son (Mr. Akbar) would translate.

Things did not go well. Mr. Wali had been to Pakistan. The American interrogators wanted to know exactly when. "Exactly when" is a difficult concept for some cultures. People from Mr. Wali's world generally do not keep calendars--"Most of them don't even know how old they are," Mr. Akbar notes.

"I just go to sleep, I wake up and there's a next day," he explained. "I feed myself, I go to sleep and there's a next day."

Abdul Wali, in response to interrogators on why he did not exactly know when he was in Pakistan

Wali's translator tried to settle Wali down a bit Mr. Akbar felt a bit responsible--his father had told Wali that if he told the truth, all would go well.

I approached Wali, and to calm him, put my hand on his shoulder. "Just say the truth," I told him, trying to sound normal. "Nothing is going to happen if you just say the truth." Then I walked out of the room, promising myself that I'd come back and check up on him. He died before I got the chance.

Hyder Akbar, NYT Magazine, July 11, 2004

David A. Passaro, a CIA contractor, was indicted last month for assault of Mr. Akbar.

Putting food by...

The cultural divide between "modern" Americans and much of the rest of the world defies our own understanding. We identify differences by language, by clothing.

Many of us are startled by an Indian who works alongside of us in a suit, by an Orthodox Jew not tripping on a beard, by Muslims in bluejeans. If we cannot get beyond outward appearances, what hope have we of grasping a culture that does not respect the calendar?

Clocks were invented by Christian monks to aid in praying. We worship clocks now instead of the Creator. Much of the world still follows the sun and the seasons--survival depends on it. Our survival here in the States depends on the clock, the calendar. We live in a cash society--no cash, no shelter.

We see the world differently than our forebears did--not necessarily a bad thing. Our productivity (in the short term, at least) exceeds the manna from heaven in the Hebrew Bible. We simply cannot accept that anyone sees the world differently.

Ghandi did not go to University in a loin cloth--he did not rise from the uneducated masses. He was "one of us" who chose a different path.


And what does any of this have to do with "putting food by"?

Putting food by...

Remember your grandmother's cooking? How quaint. Why did our grandmothers submit themselves? Why would anyone slave like that in the kitchen? We are culturally divided from our own history.

We are not "bad" people, but we truly cannot understand a universe where a calendar does not matter--and we are blind to our ignorance.

Putting food by places us back 3 generations. Sloppiness will get you hungry. Neighbors mattered. Corn was picked when it was ripe, whether late July or mid-August.

Some of my hops are ready to pluck. Every book I've read said mid-August is as early as they mature. It's not even mid-July. My life does not depend on hops, but if it did, I'd trust my senses before I'd trust a calendar.

In Afghanistan, my hops would be picked today. Poppies have a better market value. The Afghans know this.

We're still learning.

A black swallowtail meandered around the garden yesterday. She (lots of blue) flew with an awkward grace--she stopped to rest on the edge of a large grape leaf, then slowly revealed her wings. The left was missing both its tail and a chunk in the upper wing. She had a story to tell, but she kept silent.

Black swallowtails are particular about what to feed their young--carrots, fennel, and dill. She circled the garden a couple of times, then flew over the fence. In a couple of minutes she arced around the garden again, then left.

I will look for pearls (eggs) on the dill today.

I wrote this 4 years ago. I have fewer functioning brain cells now than I did then, and even if I live to 80 (unlikely), I have but 31 Junes left. My son is on his way back from Atlantic City today. He's a very, very good poker player. My Dad enjoyed the idea that his son practiced medicine at all, and especially enjoyed that I practiced in the projects. I enjoy the idea that my son is a very, very good poker player. My clanfolk tend to be bright--good thing, because we also tend to make dubious choices. But in a world where lightning bugs exist, what else can we do but dance, sing, drink, and die?

Today is Father's Day. My youngest is 17 years old. Today we went afroggin'! Our trip started with a long day's journey seeking a fishing license. Blue laws combined with my sensational lack of sense of direction resulted in a good afternoon's worth of conversation with my son as we got lost between stores. My son Kevin had better things to do on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. Miles and miles later, and dollars and dollars lighter, my son and I were vested by the good State of New Jersey with the power to legally harvest frogs, though harvesting more than 15 per day would require yet another (no doubt with a more formal font and maybe even gold lettering) license. Kevin raised an interesting philosophical point. Our goal was tadpoles, not frogs. At what point did the good State of New Jersey consider a tadpole to be a frog? We await the Supreme Court's opinion, though at the moment, they seem to be busy defining when an embryo becomes a human. Meanwhile, we paid our bucks and attached our new yellow pieces of paper to our bodies, hoping our choice of locations was conspicuous enough to be legally conspicuous, as required by law. New Jersey has had a drought the prior two springs--catching tadpoles still required mucking through knee-deep mud, but ponds were smaller, and the tadpoles, quite frankly, were too preoccupied by a receding world to fear the likes of me. This year, however, the odds have been altered. We have seen a deluge that rivals that of Noah. The tadpoles have the advantage. They took advantage of their advantage. Through some twist of fate, our Second Annual Tadpole Hunt fell on the same day as some North Jersey Latin American Festival at our favorite tadpole stomping grounds, Branch Brook Park in Newark, New Jersey. My son was a good sport. 'Twas, after all, Father's Day. Still, the spectacle of an Anglo (his mother's blood, not mine) and a Celt tromping through the mud chasing tadpoles entertained some folks who had wandered from the festival, and my son started to look a little embarrassed. The water is deeper this year--the tadpoles saw us coming, and we were left with nothing but mud in our nets. We left without a tadpole. Our small backyard pond will be silent this summer, unless a visitor decides to make this his home. I am left with the fond memories of a young man who weighs more than me chasing tadpoles. I may not be so lucky ever again. I am just thankful I got to do this one more time. At least until a grandchild arrives.

printable version

Most tissue specimens for histopathological examination should be sent to the laboratory covered by at least 10 times their own volume of 10% formalin and should NOT be squeezed into small containers.

Pathology Specimen
Handling Histopathological specimens
The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals

Simple enough instructions, straight out of the manual. Medicine, like the military, has clear rules. And like the military, clear rules get blurry in real life.

The holding area in an emergency department has fuzzy lines of responsibility. Often tucked away in a back corner, the holding area is where patients go while waiting for a bed. The ER doctor has pretty much done what she needs to do, and the admitting doctor has not yet quite taken over.

The first time I got called to the adult holding area, I got lost. I was called to resuscitate a baby.

I found a heavy young woman looking rather sad lying on the bed. The "patient" lay in a stainless steel emesis basin.

"It had a heartbeat. It's policy to call the pediatrician." The nurse was officious, and enjoying his role a tad too much.

"It's nonviable." I stated the obvious. The fetus' glistening chest pulsated with the rhythm of its beating heart. "I couldn't get a tube into it even if I wanted to--"

I am not sure the woman knew she had been pregnant. An obstetrical resident wandered in, muttering something about the specimen. I wrapped the fetus up in a towel, and offered it to the mother. She glanced at the fetus, and chose not to hold it.

I wasn't sure how far along the pregnancy had gone. A look at the crown-rump length put it at about 17 weeks. Tiny arms, tiny hands, tiny fingers, tiny nails. The eyelids, thankfully, were fused. I was annoyed at having been called.

A staff member fetched a plastic bucket of formalin. It sat on the stainless steel lid of a laundry basket in the room. I set the fetus on the lid as well, still wrapped in the towel.

It can take a while for a fetal heartbeat to stop. The creature was nonviable, but it was not dead.

What happened next can only happen in a world where argument replaces imagination, and efficiency replaces compassion.

Someone placed the fetus in the formalin. The fetus reacted.

"That's what the lab said I should do," a voice uttered. I shook my head and walked out.

The hospital administrator insisted that I fill out a death certificate. I refused. The fetus was nonviable, both by our technical limits and by legal definition. If neither the state nor I could recognize the fetus as human while still alive, it seemed perverse to recognize it as such when dead.

Still, it was alive. It was human. It reacted.

grain mill

Ye Maids who toiled so faithfully at the Mill
Now cease your work and from these toils be still;
Sleep now till dawn, and let the birds with glee
Sing to the ruddy morn from bush and tree;
For what your hands performed so long and true,
Ceres has charged the Water Nymphs to do..

Antipator of Thessalonica, 85 B.C. ¹

Grinding grain is hard work, still done by hand by much of the world. Hard kernels of wheat berries, barley, maize, or rice are ground into flour, the foundation for life in an agricultural society. Bread, booze, Fritos, Lucky Charms--all from ground grains.

On Sabbath, I grind wheat, a direct violation of the melachot. It is hard work. Muscles strain, but they know what to do. My mind is idle, and in the steady whir of burr on burr, my thoughts wander.

I use a Country Mills grain mill--a solid hand mill. It will last longer than me. The burrs need replacing every decade or so, but the rest of the machine will be fit for my grandchildren, should they choose to grind.

A small depression is growing deeper in the cement basement floor--my left foot rocks back and forth as I crank, and over time, the sole of my foot has made its own cradle. My son's bicycle rusts on my front porch--he has long outgrown it. When I get the time, I will figure out a way to rig his bicycle to my mill. I am not getting any younger, and my legs are stronger than my arms.

A wheat berry makes a fine crackle as it gets crunched between the plates of the hand mill. One stationary plate, one rotating plate. The noise sounds like the white noise background of an untuned radio. When I have drunk too much melomel, I imagine that the wheat berries make a noise beyond the crunching on the bran. There are worse things to imagine.

First my right arm, then my left. I can feel my biceps swell a bit from the work. The legs work, too, shifting my weight back and forth with each pass of the milling wheel. My breathing picks up. Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. When the wheat berries were made in Montana, the wheat plant breathed in carbon dioxide, and using the sun's energy and water, created carbohydrates and oxygen. The sun's heat released again in the warmth of my breath, my churning muscles, the steel plates grinding the wheat.

Before the last few wheat berries pass through the millstone, I pick 2 or 3 to go into the garden. They are, after all, alive, until ground into flour. Conscious? No, but perhaps that's not the point. That's not the point at all.

¹ from Mill Folklore: "History or Hearsay," http://www.angelfire.com/folk/molinologist/folklore1.html

anagenesis

Fran has her hair back--silver and curly and thick.

Her breast is gone, but perhaps the cancer is gone as well. She has her hair back, though, and with it, a bit more energy. Like Samson, her strength waned when her hair fell out.




Most of the hair on your head is actively growing; this is called the anagen phase, and lasts several years. The hair follicle then enters a resting period, the telogen phase, which lasts about 1 to 3 months. (There is a winding down period from anagen to telogen called the catagen phase, which lasts 2 to 3 weeks). About 90% of the hair on a person's scalp is in the anagen phase.

Ana-: up, again, anew....gen: to be born, to become. Anagenesis, according to the OED, means "a reproduction or regeneration of structure." Anagenesis. A good word to learn on the day of the vernal equinox.

The hairs you lose while routinely shampooing your hair are usually from follicles in the telogen phase--the resting follicle easily gives up the hair. A new shaft will soon develop.

Chemotherapy is designed to kill actively growing cells. Cancer cells divide at ferocious rates, and are quite susceptible to the systemic poisons physicians administer. Other active cells, however, are also affected.

Effluvium is a flowing out, often associated with sewage. In medical terms, effluvium is the flowing of hair out your scalp. Anagen effluvium is what happens when chemotherapy stuns your hair follicles. You lose huge patches of hair, sometimes overnight, often with devastating psychological effects.




Spring arrived a few hours ago. My seedlings are in various stages of development. The first leaves sprouting from a seed are cotyledons, or seed leaves. Cotyledons among different types of plants look similar. The cotyledons feed the growing plant as it struggles to find sunlight and water.

No matter how long I have been gardening, the emergence of the first true leaves from a seedling startles me. My rosemary seedlings look like anything else the first week or two, then the first blades of rosemary leaves emerge. My tomato plants all look the same until the potato leaf of the brandywine clashes with the spiny leaf of the yellow pear tomato.

I studied enough botany to understand our models of how seeds work, with nucleic acids expressing proteins that determine how a living thing transforms itself. Still, when a purple serrano thrusts brilliant purple leaves from a pale brown seed no bigger than a starved tick, something has occurred beyond a simple model.




If we truly understood the model, we could figure out a way to make Fran's breast grow again. Every nucleated cell in her body, trillions upon trillions, holds the genetic code that transformed her mother's energy into two small infant breasts. A decade later, hormones awakened a tiny part of her DNA, and her breasts developed. A few decades later, something again triggered a small nest of cells to grow wildly in the same breast, threatening her life. Cancer comes from within, from our deepest secrets of life.

Physicians do not yet know how to control the genetic code that triggers malignancy; we do know how to poison actively growing cells. For all our fancy tests and technology, fighting cancer still depends on cutting it out, poisoning it, or frying it with radiation.




The body does not forget how to make hair; remove the poisons, and the hair follicle wakes up, and starts making fibers again. Sometimes the hair returns thicker than before, sometimes a different texture. It is virgin hair, untouched by years of shampoo and dyes, agents to make it curl, agents to make it straight.

It is hard to resist touching an infant's new curls; I felt an urge to touch Fran's new silvery locks, but civil adults follow customs, and one does not impulsively stroke another's hair (unless it be a lover or a small child). In a culture that celebrates youth above wisdom, cancer remains a dirty secret. We have not developed the social graces needed around patients with severe life-threatening disease. Fran is getting better--people flock to her these days.


When my mother was dying, people came to see her, but the uneasiness could not be washed away with grim smiles. Many people find fewer visitors their last few weeks. "She needs her rest... her family needs its privacy... she does not need the stress of visitors right now." Even in hospitals, doctors pull away from the doomed.

Thank God for nurses, and assistants, and technicians who care. The doctor writes an order and walks away. A nurse injects the poison, a tech irradiates the tissue. A nursing assistant cleans up the pools of vomit and loose stool.

Dying here in the States can be a lonely activity. We have professionalized the dying process. Hospices do wonderful work, but I still think there is something terribly amiss when we rely on strangers to escort our loved ones to their death.




Today, however, is the first day of spring. Fran's hair is back, her husband is growing his first beard after shaving for almost a half century, and my rosemary seedlings know enough to make rosemary leaves. Anagenesis. I pray that in this season of exuberant growth, a few cells stay quiescent.

Amen.

elodea

I have two holes in my backyard, each one dug by a child of mine at an age when digging holes was still fun. I filled them up with water, plopped a few fish in them, and spontaneous generation took care of the rest.

Wiggly red worms, squirming ostracods, larvae of all sorts. Dragonflies thrust their asses to the sky like tiny winged mandrills. A muskrat spent its last hours in my son's pond--I doubt it drowned, but its carcass confirmed its death.

While the economy hums along, while trades get made, folks consume, and as we continue our Malthusian descent that will make lemmings look prescient, I must confess that I wile away sunny mornings staring at ponds. Oh, I might contribute to the local economy by downing an ale or two (no sense wasting time), but mostly I just sit and watch.

Late spring I played God and altered the local flora--I bought 3 sprigs of elodea. I use them in biology class, and I figured I could grow some over the summer. Like similar projects on a much larger scale, introducing a new species tipped things over a bit, and frogs can now walk over the pond barely moistening their toes.
No new lessons there.

In late June, on a particularly bright day, I noticed bubbles coming from the pond. It's not unusual to see the pond burp now and then--muck builds up on the bottom, and the mud belches some methane.

This was different--it looked like a string of champagne bubbles, tiny but furiously active. The top of the pond had pockets of fine foam.

Oxygen.

I (rather pedantically) ran off to tell my son, then I tried to write.

"Awe" does not fit the cerebral cortex well. It's a funny word, and the jaw drops when it is spoken. If the limbus had a conscious vocabulary, "awe" might be its second entry (right after "angst").

I cannot find the right words. Until I do, I will continue to stare at some bubbles.

kneading

Thoughts while kneading bread.

On a good bread day, when the humidity is just right, the yeast is budding furiously and happily in their doughy world, and when my hands work unconsciously, my dough comes together after about 15 minutes of kneading.

Fold and press, fold and press, fold and press.

An occasional turn of the dough. Fold and press. It will be ready when, as the adage goes, it feels like a baby's bottom. It usually takes me about 200 folds. The purists may push for 300 folds, but after 200 or so, it feels ready. I am middle-aged, and I only know the feel of a middle-aged woman's thigh. Enough for me. Perhaps younger bakers yearn for the firmness of 300 folds. Let them yearn. They have more energy, and certainly more time.

200 folds. Each fold doubles the number of layers of dough beneath my hands. Two. Four. Eight.

Which would you rather have, the old teaser goes....a million dollars, or a penny doubled every day for a month?

16...32...64...128...256...512...1,024.

Each layer makes the gluten strands stretch and layer upon itself. A network to catch the carbon dioxide released by the yeasts busy budfucking in the dough.

2,048....4,096...8,192...16,384...32,768...65,536...131,072.

Most of us in this part of the world do not exert a whole lot of energy. Most of the carbon dioxide we release comes from the decomposed ferns and trilobites and pterodactyls that we burn without a thought. Sunlight captured 10 million years ago combusts, consumes O2, produces CO2. In the States, few folks walk anymore.

262,144...524,288...1,048,576...2,097,152....4,194,304....8,388,608

My dough doubles in size in less than two hours. The hot breath of yeasties, budding and budding and budding.

16,777,216...33,554,432...67,108,864...134,177,200...268,000,000....536,000,000

We screw. We fuck. We get laid. We score. We pant. Sex. A commodity. An end in itself. Few of us take the time to bud anymore. I want to make a bud. Asexual reproduction. Proof I matter. Silly thoughts. My brow beads with sweat. Kneading is hard work.

1,072,000,000...2,144,000,000...5,488,000,000....10,976,000,000...21,195,200,000...43,904,000,000...

The moon is about 240,000 miles away. That's about 127, 200,00 feet. Or about 1,524,000,000 inches. My layers of dough are now 40 times more than the inches to the moon. And I am not even a quarter of the way through.

---

I have a 300 gallon puddle in my backyard. It has a lot of critters in it. One large koi. 2 bream I nabbed from a Newark park trying to catch tadpoles. Perhaps a few dozen nymphs. A hundred thousand copepods. And hundreds of millions of bacteria. Each critter no more aware of me than I of each of them.

87,808,000,000...175,616,000,000...351,232,000,000...702,464,000,000...1,404,928,000,000

My head hurts from counting. Too many critters to think about. 6 million people, give or take a million, slaughtered in Nazi concentration camps. 20 million Russians perished in the latest world war. Maybe a million less. Maybe a million more.

2,809,856,000,000...no more counting--sweat in my eyes.

I say a prayer when I toss my yeast down the drain after they convert raw honey and blueberries into a heavenly melomel that makes my legs wobble. I doubt they hear my prayer. Most are dormant from exhaustion, poisoned by the alcoholic milieu they created. It is a prayer of thanks.

The yeast in my dough are less lucky--they are living and breathing, and they will be baked. While I no longer ponder the sentience of critters who have less than two cells to rub together, I no longer question their desire. I hear the burbling of carbon dioxide passing through airlock in my basement as the yeasties bud and bud and bud to exhaustion. I feel most alive when my lifelong love and I share breath and energy. Get the cortex out of the way. The cortex developed late in the scheme of evolution. The medulla is where we fall in love.


We try to imagine the pain of millions dead. The real challenge is to feel the pain of one creature dying. I recoil at the thought of millions slaughtered. I get real quiet when I remember the slow death of my mother. Millions matter, of course, but only matter if I have the courage to recall my mother's strength. "We are born to die," she said. Maybe. Just not so slowly. Not so painfully. Not so grotesquesly.


Fold and press and fold and press.

I have a recipe for bread from an ancient Yugoslovian woman. I know her grand-daughter. I taught her grand-daughter a little bit about medicine.
Her grand-daughter knows I love bread. Her grand-daughter is not so far removed from her grandmother's world that she does not recognize a wheat berry. She gave me her grandmother's recipe for potato bread.
I am such an idiot. "Why potato bread?" I asked. Dr. Elana bowed her head ever so slightly--she still had an old world respect for her teachers. "Because," she explained, " we had no grain during the war. We were starving."

Fold and press and fold and press.

"We were starving" before she was even born, and she still feels the pangs.


Almost done. I slap the dough. Almost right. It is warming up from the life inside. Americans confuse sensuality and sexuality because we cannot see that the two cannot be separated. We pretend otherwise at our peril. We blame the Puritans. I'd bet my loaf of bread that Puritans knew how to make love better than most of us. I know they could make bread better than us. Too easy to blame the Puritans.


I fold again. The dough snaps from a bubble trapped between the layers. The dough is ready.

I slap the dough. I like the sound. I slap it again. Millions and millions of layers. A fine net of gluten strands ready to catch the breaths of jubilant yeasties madly reproducing, respiring, realizing. This will be a good loaf. You know before the first rise.


A prayer before I thrust the dough into the oven hours later. The yeast die noiselessly, and (good western man I am), without awareness.

Still, on a perfect summer afternoon, it is not awareness that matters. Desire.

Desire without awareness.

jumping fish

I grew up close enough to the Jersey shore to have spent many hours submerged up to my nose in the Atlantic Ocean. If you tilt your head back underwater, you can see your reflection in the underside of the sea; a silvery, shimmery Neptune child gazes back.

I mostly bobbed up and down, nose sometimes in the water, sometimes out, pretending I was a salt-water crocodile. With eyes so close to the surface, the seaweed and broken reeds floating by loomed like large islands. When I turned away from the shore gazing eastward, I was the largest creature in the universe, not quite human anymore.



In New Jersey, what most of the world calls silversides or smelt, we call spearing. Menidia notata. They are mostly translucent, no bigger than a pinky. Each side has a silver band that looks like smooth tin foil. They have straight jawlines that make them look rather glum close-up, but since we mostly saw them when threading them on a hook as bait, looking glum seemed appropriate.

Spearing travel in huge schools, almost invisible except for the occasional flash as the sun catches the silver. The surface sometimes erupted with them when a predator came underneath the school, but otherwise spearing had no particular reason to jump.
Or so the books will tell you.

One August afternoon, when I was 11 or 12ish, and I was busy conquering the sea world, a piece of a phragmites reed drifted by. A tiny fish jumped over it. Odd.
I drifted closer to the reed, my eyes inches away. One fish, then another, their bands of tin flashing in the sun. I spotted the school just below the surface. I figured a few got too close to the reed, and jumped over it out of need. I continued to watch.

The fish jumping over the reed appeared to turn back. The school was mulling about in no particular direction. The fish were lining up to jump over the reed.



For the empiricists:

The individual subjects were observed approaching the reed at about 1 to 2 inches below the surface, then leaping about 1/2 inch before the reed, clearing it by no more than a 1/2 inch, then appeared to turn after reentering back into the water. The fish consistently approached the reed from the same side.

For the rest of you:

How do you know the fishes are enjoying themselves? They jump for no apparent reason over a randomly floating object on a lovely day when (for the moment) no predators were interested in them, when the water was not cloudy with the milt of spawn, and when they forgot a crocodile sea god was watching).

I observed this more than once, or so I remembered. I am old enough now confuse imagination and memory. The tao tale above says as much as needs to be said contemplating joy in fish, and the tale reminded me of my jumping spearing.

Then the tao met Google.

Had anybody ever reported seeing fish jump over reeds for no apparent reason (or at least for any reason apparent to humans, who have an insatiable need for "reasons"). If you throw "fish" and "jumping" and "twig" together, you get a few hits. One of the hits is for an entry in Fish-Sci.

Fish-Sci is a listserv, a "scientific forum on fish and fisheries." On it fish biologists carry out long, serious conversations about, well, fish. You will find discussions on "otoliths in dolphinfish", "iron content in adult eel", and "fish biomass estimates for oligotrophic systems," all within the past 6 months.

The inquiry started innocently--Randy E. Edwards, PhD. and principal scientist for the Center for Coastal Geology needed to present a poster to the International Symposium on Sturgeon in Oshkosh, WI back in 2001. His question was simple: why do Gulf sturgeon jump? In his thoughtful letter, he listed numerous known reasons why fish jump.

A number of hypotheses have been brought forward to explain jumping behavior and include: parasite shedding, startle reflex, behavioral communication (to alert other individuals of their presence), to help shed eggs during spawning, nuptial behavior, and air gulping or swim bladder adjustment. .... Gulf sturgeon jumping is not temporally random, but instead is concentrated in the early morning and late afternoon. Why mullet jump (often in the same habitats as sturgeon) is not known.

The resulting discussion takes on a dance worthy of Albert the Alligator and company in Pogo. Fish apparently jump, at times, for no discernible reason.

Ivor Growns, a scientist with the Australian government, dodged the issue with an anecdote:

On a lighter note, I have heard of a member of the public sending a letter to their local parlimentarian asking why fish jumped. The minister asked for an explaination [sic] from the Fisheries department. The staff member sent back a reply saying "Because they are happy".

Another scientist, Glenn Crossin, a salmon specialist for the Centre for Applied Conservation Biology in Vancouver, Canada, notes that sockeye salmon expend tremendous amounts of energy getting to their spawning grounds, yet when they get there, spend two weeks jumping and wasting energy.

Energetically one might think that this would be a risky behavior. Salmon typically expend most of thier [sic] fixed somatic energy reserves (mostly lipid) just reaching the spawning ground. Thus to expend limited energy unnecessarily, particularly when their one and only spawning opportunity lays ahead, seems risky.

When he asked his 9 year old nephew what he thought, the child answered "maybe they are just so happy to have made it there."

Ha-ha, kids are cute, let's get back to science.

Dr. Rodney Rountree is a scientist. He has a PhD., he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, he knows fish. He finally said what the others were skirting:

Fish likely jump for a lot of reasons, but I've often observed fishes jumping for no obvious reason (i.e., no predators or feeding behavior). I've often felt that the often cited purpose of jumping as an effort to dislodge external parasites (e.g., ocean sunfish) seemed inadequate. I even admit to thinking that some fish are just playing after on many different occasions watching Atlantic silversides (Menidia menidia) jumping over floating twigs over and over again. It sure seemed like a game.... The jumping fish never made contact with the twig, which might be expected if they were trying to rub off a parasite or scratch an itch.

Spearing like to play. Or at least it's a reasonable hypothesis.

I wonder what else I taught myself to forget.


Sources:
FISH-SCI archives, June, 2001, http://segate.sunet.se/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0106&L=fish-sci
Personal observations and a ragged memory

celsias

I stumbled upon Celsias today while reading about the colony collapse disorder--it's worth a peek.