March 30, 2009--1,000th Behind the New York Times

The first posting was on August 26, 2005. I'm still here and so is this. I hope you have found some of these to be interesting and at times enjoyable. Here from about a year ago, in slightly different form, I reprieve one of my favorites. It's a little long, but I hope you like it.

My Inner Fish

If you require further evidence about the truth of Evolution, come to Florida in March when the Spinner Sharks are migrating.

Last Friday, waiting for the appearance of inspiration in my writing room from which I have an unimpeded view of the Atlantic, they were on full display. Tracking north, following their food supply—in this case I learned, Spanish Mackerel--vast schools of these ancient predators thrashed in a feeding frenzy that roiled the otherwise flaccid ocean.

It was clear even to an uninformed observer why they have earned their common name, “Spinner” (more pictorial than the Latin, Carcharhinus Brevipinna), as they leapt fully from the ocean and as if thrilled to leave their natural home if only for a moment to spin joyously glinting in sunlight. While overhead, ignoring them, circled scores of clamoring gulls and pelicans, which from great heights slammed headlong into the water to gather their share of whatever the ravenous Spinners had left behind.

Even before this riotous display I had been thinking about fish and even doing some reading about them. They are everywhere down here. Not just outside my window and not easy to ignore. There is their sport and commercial side. The Old Dixie Seafood Shop, for instance, just down the road is where fish boat captains bring their catch and the proprietors clean and display them in sparkling ice chests. There’s local Snapper and Red Mullet and Mahi Mahi. Swordfish from the Gulf Stream and whatever Tuna remains after the rest is snatched up by the Japanese fish buyers. The owner’s wife turns the occasional Wahoo into grillable steaks and whatever doesn’t get sold she transmutes into an incandescent salad flavored with just the right dash of celery-seed-suffused Old Bay. And then there are their specialties—Key-West style Conch Chowder and Smoked Marlin. They tell us that the Marlin spread is so popular that they sell 80 pounds of it a week. All from a tattered shack of a shop on an out-of-the-way stretch of, yes, the Old Dixie Highway.

But my reading takes me to very different places—to visit our deeper relationship to fish. Well beyond all the local surfcasting, sport fishing, and the resulting pleasures of the kitchen and table.

I had known from just a dollop of poorly-taught high school biology, when unfettered they still taught Evolution in public schools, that humans are no more than evolved fish. Fish that on a day, eons past, wiggled up onto land and of those that survived in this dramatically new environment then slowly passed along to us many of the physical characteristics that, transmuted, we too casually take to be unique to our own species.

For example, our boney head and large brain case with our sense organs fastened on are vestiges of our fish origins. And the fact that we have two ears, two nostrils, and two eyes set ideally apart, all essential to our survival, creativity, and progress, are also descended from fish, which also carry their sense organs in pairs.

The spines that allow us to walk upright so we can traverse the earth in bounding strides are modified versions of fishes’ spiny innards. All it takes to make that point is to observe what a waiter sets quickly aside after he filets your broiled Pompano. It takes little imagination to see the relationship between a fish’s inner scaffolding and our endoskeleton.

Fins became arms and legs; and our hinged jaw, tongue, and enameled teeth are also from the sea. Fishes’ cranial nerves are not that far from our own. In fact, premeds who struggle to recognize, identify, and memorize their sequence begin by dissecting the skull or chondocrania of Dogfish Sharks. If they do so successfully, as I pathetically once attempted, they discover the Olfactory nerve, then the Optic, next the Oculomotor, after that the Trochlear, the Trigeminal . . . and finally the Vegus. All remarkably similar to what one would discover during the first year in medical school. (Though I opted out before then and cannot offer direct testimony.)

More recent studies of our distant cousins reveal that fish have many of the same social skills that make us, it appears, not-so-uniquely human. Most live in schools in large part so that they can be of help to each other, engaging routinely in acts of considerable, apparently generous fish-to-fish reciprocity.

African Cichlids typically live in groups of ten or more and include a breeding pair and an assortment of helpers. Some of the workers defend their territory, others make sure the nests are cleaned, and still others do the hard work of oxygenating the breeding pair’s eggs. And remarkably, hear this human relatives, these so-called helper fish aren’t even biologically related to those they tend. They apparently do this thankless work so that they can benefit from the security against predators and the food supply made available by their collective behavior.

And fascinatingly, some fish even experience menopause! Was this an evolutionary necessity? And did they need to pass this too along to us? I like my three-dimensional vision, but . . .

Enough reading! I needed to move this research out of my study and into the real biological world to see if what I had been learning in books could be tested and verified. And so, during the Spinner Shark migration season, I took to the beach. With Rona not more than two steps behind. I suspected, to save me from myself.

In my mind it was like entering a scene from Steven Spielberg’s classic Jaws. I could almost hear that foreboding music thumping relentlessly above the muted surf. But unlike in Jaws the beach was preternaturally deserted. No one was standing ankle-deep in water, ominously looking out to sea in search of the fearsome Great White that was ravaging their community. Better the empty beach, I thought, to enable me, undistracted, to pursue my primordial explorations. Sharks I was seeking to be sure, but for what they could teach me or confirm what I had plucked from my reading about our ancestral relationship. This was not to be some cheap thrill from a dime novel or tawdry movie. No, mine was to be the explorations of a budding naturalist.

But wouldn’t you know that the first thing that caught my eye was a single footprint, the only one left behind by the wash of the lowering tide.

“Friday!” I cried out to the startled Rona. “Look,” I pointed in my delirium, “It’s Friday.”

“What are you talking about?” Rona, gasping, asked. She was out of breath from having to trot to keep up with me. “It’s Sunday, silly. I know when we live this way it’s hard not to confuse the days of the week.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean it’s who I mean. Don’t you see it’s just like Friday?” In my excitement the words came out twisted as I pointed again at the quickly eroding footprint.

She passed along the familiar smile of sweet understanding she employs when she finds herself in need of humoring me. Typically, as yesterday, when I was off on one of my fancies, which I have to admit are occurring more and more frequently during our unstructured days. I realized that this was another of those occasions when I allow my literary imagination to distract me from encounters with the “real” world, as Sunday when I was attempting to pursue my new found interest in interspecies transmission.

Enough with Jaws, enough of Robinson Crusoe! I was determined that from now on it would strictly be beach-shore science.

Friday would resolve itself again into the day before the weekend because the time I needed to know more about would be the Devonian, the geologic Period during the Paleozoic Era that lasted from about 415 to 360 million years ago when that first fish decided to try its luck on land and seed-bearing plants appeared and spread across the earth. This, I assured myself, was not going to be just another late afternoon 21st century walk on Delray’s beach.

And as if the sea and land could read my thoughts and in so doing generously chose to reveal some of their secrets, I saw right by the margin where the water met the sand edge signs of the kind of earth-shaping forces that carved our Grand Canyon, etched the shapes we see now across our vast western badlands, and put down those sedimentary deposits where the fossil record reveals the exoskeleton and story of those first amphibious creatures that are ultimately our ancestors. A microcosm of geological processes compressed in the brief time it takes for an exchange of tides.

“Look Rona,” I said, pointing, “look at this.”

“What is it this time?” I sensed some exasperation. “What are you pointing at?”

“Right here. Right there. A miniature Grand Canyon.”

“You must be joking. We’re in Florida, remember? Has the sun gotten to you already?”

“I’m not joking. Come here and take a look.” Hands on hips Rona sauntered slowly toward me. “You need to come quickly. The next surge of waves will wipe it away.”

“What kind of Grand Canyon is it that a little wavelet,” there was virtually no surf, “that a little swell of water can obliterate something that took eons,” she was playing with me, “to erode?”

“I’m not saying it’s a real canyon. Only that what took, what, 20 million years for Nature to achieve in Arizona is happening right here now in just a few hours!” Rona was staring skeptically at me rather than at what was in evidence right there at her feet. “I know you think I’m crazy,” she was nodding vigorously, “but I mean it. The same forces at work here are the ones that carved that wonder. Water in rapid motion, with sand grit suspended in it, is etching away at the subsurface right here on the beach just as the Colorado River did its thing out west.” Plaintively I looked at her.

Rona knew these “insights” were important to me so she relented a bit. “Can we move on? It’s almost time for our afternoon drink and I thought we were out here looking for sharks. Not to imagine ourselves onto Defoe’s island, teach Friday English, or search for the origins of the western landscape.”

“I hear you, but indulge me one more thing. I’ll take a pass on the canyon-building stuff--though if you glance directly down on what’s right below the water here you’ll have to admit it looks remarkably like looking out on the Mohave from 35,000 feet.” Rona, with her arms folded across her chest, was now looking at me out of the corner of her eye. Though she wasn’t wearing a watch, she looked at her wrist as if to check to see how much time I was wasting. I knew I had only a few more minutes of her attention.

“I mean see all those shells that you like to rummage around in? Thousands, millions of them that keep getting deposited here with every change of tide. What do you think will happen to them in 10 million years? Limestone, that’s what. They’ll be turned into limestone and in it, as it compresses, paleontologists will, 10 million years from now, find the fossil remains of these mollusks and the bones of the Gulls and Sand Pipers and Pelicans.”

“And me and you too,” Rona muttered, “if we don’t get a move on.”

In an attempt to acknowledge her sense of impatience, I pressed on and said, “But where are my sharks? The earth works business is fine, but I’m on a mission here.” To acknowledge how impossible I was being I smiled, “I’m searching for my earliest cousins.”

As if on cue, right before us, not more than ten yards from the beach, another feeding frenzy exploded as dozens of Spinner Sharks descended upon a school of Spanish Mackerel that had become trapped between the series of shoals which were among the ones I had been claiming were proto-canyons.

We instinctually jumped back to escape this thrashing, though we knew that the sharks were much more interested in their Sashimi earlybird dinner than anything our flesh might offer.

“Look at that,” I cried, “Have you ever seen anything more basic, more natural, more primitive?”

“No comment,” Rona snorted. “It’s getting late.”

“Come on, admit it, this is exciting. Isn’t it?”

As evidence that Rona in fact was enjoying this as much as I, she caught my eye as the light lowered and blew me a kiss, “I do love you. You’re such a boy.” And added, “Yes, I’m excited. I love seeing animals in the wild. Even here in Condoland.”

As we were exchanging air kisses, the mackerel, in a hopeless attempt to escape, had worked their way closer to the beach. Those that had managed to avoid being consumed quivered in just inches of water. Every time a wave slid back to the ocean, exposed to the air, with gills flailing, the mackerel, out of their element, flipped about desperately on the sand, frantically trying to get back into the water though there they would again have to contend with the sharks, which continued to hover, circling darkly in somewhat deeper water.

That is, all but one of the sharks lurked there, waiting for the return of the hapless baitfish. That one, we watched in rapt fascination, was working its way through the channels (my imagined canyons) that had been scooped out by the relentless waves.

The mackerel shivered, huddling closer together as they observed its ominous approach. As it closed in for the literal kill, as it slithered into shallower water, Jaws like, its dorsal fin, pierced the surface. I couldn’t help myself--the iconic music again started up in my head.

It moved in on the first cornered group and snapped up all of them as if it were vacuuming debris from the sea bottom. And then just as quickly it turned to the left where another small school was attempting to scurry. It was so intent on completing its carnage that it ignored the underwater contours and thus found itself beached on a small ridge.

It perched there a moment fully out of the ocean. In the air. And then, wiggling its body from side to side, managed to slide off the mini-shoal and back into deeper water.

Now seemingly safe and scooting to rejoin its mates that still hovered well off shore, as is so common at sea, the ocean’s surface altered. Where it had been quiescent, in that brief time it became roiled by some subterranean force, and the newly-generated waves swept the unsuspecting shark up onto the beach itself, depositing it right at our feet.

In spite of the now real danger, Rona and I did not take even one protective step backwards. Being there for this shark’s crisis took us over and riveted us to this perfect place to witness its final throes. And it would be a lesson from Nature about the dangers of greed and overreaching and survival.

As we stood there looking down at the shark in its final agony, out in deeper water, its mates gave up their gorging and one by one begin to leap from the water, spinning in the air as if to signal that they were there, as understanding witnesses and as a collective biological beacon, glinting in the remaining sunlight, and by so doing generating enough activity and reflective light perhaps to guide their avaricious comrade back to their protective embrace.

But as we peered down at the shark, now fully swept onto the land, ignoring the frenzied leaping and spinning of the others, it looked up at us and we exchanged what must be described as a knowing, inter-species glance of understanding: we recognized its plight as a fellow creature and it seemed to knowingly remind us of our ancestral connection.

Sharks are the earliest of sea creatures, I had read, to have paired pectoral and pelvic fins; and, using these, this particular shark, our ancestral progenitor, worked its way further up onto the strand. I wondered if it had become so disoriented by what had happened that it was placing itself at additional risk by struggling further landward on its protean legs.

While I thus pondered, it looked once more in my direction and, I think with a version of a shark wink, using its four fins again, turned its body toward the ocean and fish-waddled back to from whence it had come. And still belonged.
But where indeed, I thought, did it belong?

For surely, many millennia ago, one of its ancestors had made a very different decision and here we are, having survived to ponder our own origins.

“It’s getting late,” Rona said, pulling me back from my reveries. “We didn’t have any lunch today and I’m getting hungry.”

I knew there was no possibility that I could continue to hold her here. So I said, “Me too.” In fact, I had had enough for one day and was looking for a reason to leave.

“You know the other night we went to that wonderful Greek restaurant. Taverna Kyma I think it’s called. I had a delicious Greek fish, a Lavraki, that they grill on a wood fire. I could go for that again. What about you? You had one too and liked it.”

With a final look out to the ocean where the school of Spinners had retreated, I said, “Kyma’s OK with me, but tonight I think I’ll have the lamb kabob.”