Lumpfish love isn't free

Who knew lumpfish could stir passions so? After yesterday's post on lumpfish, Jón Baldur Hlíðberg from Iceland sent an email saying lumpfish caviar is great, and kindly shared his fantastic illustrations of the fish of Iceland, including this lovely male lumpfish (right).

As if that wasn't enough on lumpfish, the astute Wolfman Jack noted the risks of fishing lumpfish in a comment to yesterday's post...just as I was ready to get some lumpfish caviar thanks to Jón's note. And I didn't get just one or two lumpfish items, the prolific Greg Laden featured lumpfish as "cool and odd" on his great blog, and the blogfish hit counter went nuts on Friday, partially due to lumpfish traffic. We scored over 5,000 unique visits on Friday, a blogfish record. Thanks all for stopping by, and since you seem to like odd sea creature stories I'll try to find more for you.

Now if you really want to know more about lumpfish, they are cold water fish that guard nests of young, some have suckers on their bellies that allow them to cling to rocks, Webster's online dictionary tells us that the word "lumpfish" is used 6 times out of 100 million words written or spoken in English, and the lumpfish is also known as paddlecock or lumpsucker.

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Lumpfish caviar, the sublime ugly

Would you buy caviar from this fish? Here's someone who will sell you lumpfish caviar? When the high end caviar gets scarce, who knows where we'll have to go for more.



Maybe it's time to bring back one of our heroes...today lumpfish caviar, tomorrow blobfish caviar?

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Sea lice from salmon farms killing wild salmon

Very bad news from British Columbia, super-dense salmon farms breed sea lice that may exterminate wild salmon runs in the same areas. We may face a choice between salmon farms and wild salmon. Which would you choose?

This isn't a new problem, we've been killing wild salmon for decades with our government-run salmon farms called hatcheries. Meant to protect salmon, we now know that hatcheries harm wild salmon runs while producing fish for people to catch. Hatcheries are controversial at best among wild fish advocates.

What is a salmon hatchery? Salmon hatcheries are fish farms that release fish to live part of their life wild. They're built to compensate for habitat loss, or simply to try to increase salmon production so people can catch more salmon. Fish agencies have routinely blocked and killed wild salmon runs on rivers where hatcheries are built, to protect hatcheries from contamination.

Can wild salmon be helped? Not so long as the seafood industry and the federal government count hatchery salmon as "wild."

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Electric eel lights christmas tree

Is this the ultimate in green energy? An electric eel's power has been harnessed in Japan to light a Christmas tree.

Some eels generate electric fields to detect prey in murky waters, by detecting disturbances in the electric field. By placing electrodes in the eels tank, the eel-power is made to flow through a circuit and light up a christmas tree.

This is cute, but I doubt we'll see eel-power used for industrial purposes.

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Science vs. religion clash: is a whale a fish?

What seems like a basic biological question blew up into a vitriolic public smackdown. Sound familiar?

In 1818, a whale oil dealer refused to pay a fish-product fine on whale oil, because a whale isn't a fish. The inspector insisted on the tax, and a spirited court and public battle played out.

This struggle sounds silly today, but it ignited a culture clash much like the current struggle over evolution and creation in public schools.

Ultimately a jury ruled that a "whale is a fish," until the New York legislature settled the matter by voting that whales are not fish. I knew we could count on NY.

This fascinating tale comes from D. Graham Burnett in Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature.

The Princeton University website says this about the book:

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century--one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett vividly re-creates the trial, during which a parade of experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's creatures.

When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would survive.

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