Perception

One fish asks another, "How's the water?"

"What's water?" says the other.


(Two veiled goldfish courtesy of Ohara Koson, The Rijksmuseum, and Rawpixel.com.)

WW: On the Black River

(Fishing with my nephew. Open in a new window or tab to see it better.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Pet yellow perch

(Perca flavescens)

WW: Christmas in July

(It's difficult to see at this resolution, but this tree – overhanging an idyllic spot on a swamp – is richly decorated with fishing tackle. Bass gear, for the most part. This in spite of the fact that as far as I know, no-one has ever pulled a fish out of here. But catching fish is not really the point in a place like this, at this time of year.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Koan of the Heroic Fish

A Western Zenner was visiting sacred sites in the mountains of Korea, when he happened upon the hermit Hyung meditating beside a stream.

"Why, you must be the great Hyung-roshi!" said the hiker. "Is it true that you live in perfect harmony with nature, never wanting for anything?"

"Yes," said Hyung, equanimously ignoring the Japanese honorific. "The living things of this mountain are my sangha, and they support my practice without fail."

"Give me a story to take home!" the tourist begged.

"Well," said Hyung, "a fish once saved my life."

"Wonderful!" cried the visitor. "How did this miracle happen?"

"I ate him," said Hyung.


Wu Ya's commentary: "Heroic fish gives his life for the flowers."



(A similar tale can be found in the teachings of Nasrudin.)

WW: Sand lance

(Ammodytes personatus. For some reason they often turn up dead or dying on the tidelands.)

WW: Spawned out

(Remember, young people: SEX KILLS.)

WW: Pacific staghorn sculpin

(Leptocottus armatus [I think].)

WW: Salmon shark

(Lamna ditropis)

WW: Squid eggs

(Probably Loligo opalescens.)

WW: Pet bluegill

(Lepomis macrochirus)

Hermitcraft: Bottle Traps

This one isn't about practice or practicalities. It's about fun. Sue me.

It's high summer here in the planet's attic, and the kids are out of school. Most pursuits this time of year involve aquatic habitats of one kind or another. So here's a simple little project that costs nothing and pays off big in educational entertainment for all ages. NOTE: These traps are also often used on dry land to catch lizards. If you use one for this, make double sure to check it frequently and keep it out of the sun at all times. Failing this can result in a truly horrific death for an unoffending creature.

These survey traps are made from a pair of 2-litre soda bottles, and not much else. And they really work. There are YouTube tutorials galore on the subject; a "bottle trap" search there will net (get it? [Fish]-net? [Inter]-net?) a hundred vids. But I've yet to find a design as refined as my own, so I'm sharing it. (By way of credentials: I'm an old aquarist, specialising in local habitats. At one point, when I was twelve, I had six aquariums, fresh and salt, bubbling away in my bedroom.)

The massage:

1. Remove the labels from two clean 2-litre soda bottles. They can be round New World bottles or square Old World ones. Clear plastic works best; others will also do.

2. Cut the bottom off one, neatly and carefully. Scissors work best, after making a small starting slit with a knife. Discard the bottom, or keep it for studying collected specimens and infusoria. (Very handy.)

3. Cut both the bottom and the top off the second bottle. Set aside or discard the bottom.

4. Cut a 1-inch vertical slit in one edge of the dismembered body of the second bottle.

5. Now lengthen the barrel of your trap by grafting this onto the bottomless first bottle. (Note the two-toned example in the photo.) Finesse the slitted end into the opening where the first bottle's bottom used to be, and wedge it tight and straight. You should get an overlap of about three quarters of an inch.

6. Invert the second bottle's cut-off top in the open end of the trap to form a funnel-shaped head, as shown in the photos. Remember to take the cap off first! (Autobiographical.)

7. Fasten the pieces together. The easiest and most elegant way to do this is with a pencil-tipped solder iron. Heat it up well and push the tip gently through the plastic, all along both seams. Don't rush; savour the sizzle. This typically rivets the pieces together even as it perforates them.

If you haven't got a solder iron, next best thing is a heated welding rod or similar metal, followed by a hole-punch, either for paper or leather. After that is a very sharp drill. In any case, cold holes need to be bound together; use string, twist-ties, brads, or nylon zip ties. (This actually makes a more versatile trap, because you can unmount the head to put in certain baits or remove an overlarge catch.)

You can also use a common desktop stapler on the head; a deep-throated pamphlet stapler will fasten the whole trap.

8. Perforate the trap all over, from about three inches below the head seam to about three inches short of the exhaust funnel shoulder. This helps it sink and drain readily and allows prey to smell the bait. (The upper no-hole zone is so you don't perforate the head funnel; the lower one conserves a pint of water in the exhaust funnel when you haul your trap. This greatly reduces injury to life forms, makes them easier to identify and admire, and facilitates removal.) Again, a solder iron makes the neatest and easiest holes.

To set, make a bridle by tying eight-inch strings to four evenly-spaced holes in the head seam and knotting their free ends together. Then tie a long string to the knot. Drop some bait in the barrel, mind the line, and heave the trap overboard.

If you're fishing from the bank or off a dock, you can tie the line off there; the richest pickings are in that zone, anyway. Away from shore, hang a small buoy, such as a stick, cork, fishing bobber, or small plastic bottle, on the bitter end of the trap line and bend on an external anchor, such as a brick or horseshoe, near the head. All sets must be securely belayed to structure or an anchor at all times, regardless of location.

Leave the set unmolested for several hours; overnight is best. To evacuate the catch, hold the drained trap vertically over the water or collecting bucket and unscrew the exhaust cap.

Good starter baits include bread, cheese, cat food, liver, lunch meat, tuna fish, fish parts, clam necks, cocktail shrimp, and corn. Note: it's all about the bait. One won't catch a cold; another will fill the trap. And when seasons, locations, or depths change, it's back to square one.

Survey traps such as these could serve a limited survival end, by supplying bait, or a few crawdads for food. Or they might catch fry that will tell you what to tie on to hook a real meal. Aside from that they're seriously useful in monitoring the health of a waterway (such as the lake I grew up on, which is now mostly dead from overdevelopment and repeated herbicide attacks). Set out a raft of them, vary the parameters over time, and keep careful records. Such hard data can make the difference in a bid to change local law and policy.

Or… just make some kid's day. Ever seen a four-year-old jump up and down over a sculpin in a bottle trap? If Nintendo only knew, they'd make 'em illegal.

Thumbnail-sized rock bass caught this

summer in one of these traps

WW: One-inch largemouth bass

(Micropterus nigricans.)

Baby Skates

This is an egg case from Raja binoculata, the big skate. This one has dried down to about the size of a really large fried egg; when fresh, supple, and translucent green, they're much larger. (Those of the less common Bathyraja trachura are neater and smaller.)

Skates are chondrichthyoids, cartilaginous fish related to sharks and sawfish, and closely resemble rays. When I was a kid, skates' eggs were common on the beach. I once found one still alive, with a wriggling embryo I could see inside it when I held it up to the sun. I wanted to bring it home and hatch it in a five-gallon bucket, but my long-suffering mother put her foot down. The house was already crawling with my animals; I guess a baby skate was more than she thought I really needed.

We used to see dead skates on the beach a lot, but these days it's become fairly rare. I'm not sure why. Given the great strides in reducing pollution and overfishing on this coast over the last three decades, I incline toward an oceanographic hypothesis. That our currents have changed is obvious; the beach was eroding when I was young, and now it's accreting. And of course there's climate disruption, bringing competing life forms north and driving incompatible ones elsewhere. Or killing them off entirely, when we're particularly unlucky.

Whatever the reason, I guess this is one fewer "doormat" we'll have swimming around one day.

Too bad. Skates rock.

Sea Monster

I'm reading Journey by Junk by Willard Price. It's an old discard from the San Diego Public Library, unearthed in a used book store in Olympia, Washington. (Library discards are a favourite of mine. You get the rarest, most interesting reads there.)

The book is the interesting account of a summer Price and his wife spent gunkholing Japan's Inland Sea shortly after the Second World War. But what caught my attention last night was the following passage:

Leaving Nushima, we sailed straight across an arm of the incoming Pacific with nothing between us and America -- except some five thousand miles of salt water. Sleek black porpoises played around the ship. Far out we saw the spout of a whale. But the most astonishing spectacle was the sea serpent.

What it could actually have been I have no idea and I have a fair acquaintance with the denizens of the deep. It swam with its head well out of water (sic) and its tail licking the surface some ten feet behind. Its head was irregular and crested like that of a mythical dragon or giant iguana. It was not the streamlined head of a sea snake or moray eel or conger eel. It never went down during the twenty minutes we watched it. Evidently it was a land creature, quite without gills, yet it was many miles from shore and headed straight out to sea. It did not swim with speed of a fish, but slowly and with effort as if propelled by the wriggling of the body rather than by fins. It showed no fear of the ship, even when we sailed within a few yards of it, and when we turned aside to make port it calmly continued on its course towards San Francisco.

As Price notes, he was an experienced naturalist, and wrote among other things a long sheet of children's books on exotic fauna that were required reading for boys in the post-war period. What the hell was this thing? A Google search didn't even net a mention of the mystery, let alone a resolution. None of the usual suspects are in the dock; Price makes it clear this was no fish, so oarfish, squid, whale sharks, rays, and the like are out. It also was apparently not mammalian, or even aquatic. One wishes Price could have been more specific. Colour? Order? Body type? What's ten feet long, lives in Japan, and occasionally swims to San Francisco?

Ideas welcome.


(Graphic courtesy of Sebastian Münster and Wikimedia Commons.)