The Founding Fish (33 page)
Authors: John McPhee
A boy about four feet tall wants to know if he is as long as a king snake eel. Willy measures him with an eel. He is not.
A man in camouflage pants and a sleeveless red T-shirt reaches into the fish bin and picks up specimens one by one. He opens the mouth of each fish, looks down into it, and asks Willy what it is. “Almaco jack,” Willy says. “
Seriola riviolana.
Pretty unusual.” This one? “Cubbyu.
Equetus umbrosus
.” This one? “Tilefish.
Caulolatilus chrysops
. See how the teeth are angled backward? If the guy bites into food, it's not going to come out.” In the mouth of the short-fin mako shark are two sets of teeth. “They are made to cut and then slice,” Willy says. “Which is really cool.” The sailfish, with that long hard bill, stuns prey by hitting it as if with a ball bat. Like swordfish and all other billfish, it does so with a whip of the head. “Blacktail moray,” Willy says, moving on. “
Gymnothorax kolpos
.
âGymno'
means naked. It hasn't got any scales. You can look at it and right away make a lot of predictions based on its anatomy. That eel-like body can live in cracks and crevices. Those tubular nostrils allow him to sample water farther away than would otherwise be the case. There are no paired fins. They don't need anti-roll devices.”
Seriola riviolana.
Pretty unusual.” This one? “Cubbyu.
Equetus umbrosus
.” This one? “Tilefish.
Caulolatilus chrysops
. See how the teeth are angled backward? If the guy bites into food, it's not going to come out.” In the mouth of the short-fin mako shark are two sets of teeth. “They are made to cut and then slice,” Willy says. “Which is really cool.” The sailfish, with that long hard bill, stuns prey by hitting it as if with a ball bat. Like swordfish and all other billfish, it does so with a whip of the head. “Blacktail moray,” Willy says, moving on. “
Gymnothorax kolpos
.
âGymno'
means naked. It hasn't got any scales. You can look at it and right away make a lot of predictions based on its anatomy. That eel-like body can live in cracks and crevices. Those tubular nostrils allow him to sample water farther away than would otherwise be the case. There are no paired fins. They don't need anti-roll devices.”
Back in the lab by six P.M., Willy works through the evening without dinner, putting off until midnight the cooking of fillets of dolphin and sailfish. In three days, he has collected fifty-two
species and a hundred and fifteen specimens. Fifty of the smaller fish are on the table now. Where to start?
species and a hundred and fifteen specimens. Fifty of the smaller fish are on the table now. Where to start?
He picks up a five-inch tattler bass. It was caught on squid bait three hundred feet down. Coming up so fast caused its air bladder to move into its mouth like a cherry. “These are serranids,” he says. “This family has interesting reproductive biology. Females reverse to males, and vice versa. In the spawning rush, one tattler will release an egg, another milt. Next time, each does the opposite. Sex reversal is not uncommon. Some fish are born alive, but not these.”
He fillets a one-pound leopard toadfish. There's not a lot to cut. The toadfish is seventy-five-per-cent head. It looks like a boulder with a tail. Its flesh is pure white. “Which is what you would expect in a fish that does almost nothing but sit and wait for something to go by.” It is doing less than that when it pursues an oyster. That bouldery head, with its small molarlike teeth, is a shell crusher. Willy removes the jaw muscles. They are the size and shape of two golf balls. “Are those the coolest jaw muscles you ever saw, or what?” he says. “But here's what's even more cool about this fish.” He removes a diaphanous spheroid that looks very much like a calf testicleâa mountain oyster. It is the leopard toadfish's swim bladder, wrapped in a veneer of sonic muscle, which the toadfish vibrates to make sound. “Some fish produce sound for social communication,” Willy says. “Some species make sounds with their fins, with their teeth, with their gill arches. This one does it with the swim bladder.”
After three days and nights, Willy's body is hurting; his hands are puffy and sore. What drives him on is that everywhere he looks he sees another golden chance. He has worked in the Tana River, in Kenya; in the Brisbane River, in Australia; in the Comoro Islands, off East Africa; in the ponds of the Osage Catfisheries Company, in Osage Beach, Missouri, which are full of paddlefish, sturgeons, and gars. “It's an unparalleled opportunity,” he says, once more sharpening his knife. “I couldn't collect like this anywhere in the world.”
INSIDE THE HEAD
W
hen Willy was preparing for his orals, in the Ph.D. program in zoology at Berkeley, he would read a paragraph, tie a fly, read a paragraph, tie a fly, and so on through the night. Reading, say, Don E. Rosen, Peter L. Forey, Brian G. Gardiner, and Colin Patterson's “Lungfishes, Tetrapods, Paleontology, and Plesiomorphy,” he tied royal coachmen and humpies.
hen Willy was preparing for his orals, in the Ph.D. program in zoology at Berkeley, he would read a paragraph, tie a fly, read a paragraph, tie a fly, and so on through the night. Reading, say, Don E. Rosen, Peter L. Forey, Brian G. Gardiner, and Colin Patterson's “Lungfishes, Tetrapods, Paleontology, and Plesiomorphy,” he tied royal coachmen and humpies.
“Humpies?”
“All-purpose terrestrials. They look kind of like a beetle.”
Willy's older fly rodsâsome of which he uses to this dayâwere made from fiberglass blanks he bought in Walnut Creek when he was at Berkeley. He fished Hat Creek, above Lassen. Close to the Oregon border, he caught rainbows and brook trout in the Marble Mountain Wilderness, where falling snow is not unknown in any month of the year. He fished at Bearmouth, in Montana, at the mouth of Bear Gulch. He took charter boats from Berkeley to the Farallon Islands. He still wears, at times, a Bearmouth logging cap with a mosquito fly hooked in its fabric, rusting. He tied it.
Willy joined a rod-building group and took a fly-fishing class in Berkeley, developing a tight loop on the basketball floor, early in the morning. He says he could not have afforded a graphite rod even if he made it himself. The blanks were too expensive. Besides, he had an unimpeachable reason to be loyal to glass. His first
fly rod had been given to him when he was six years old by his father's close friend and colleague Arthur M. Howald, inventor of the fiberglass fishing rod.
fly rod had been given to him when he was six years old by his father's close friend and colleague Arthur M. Howald, inventor of the fiberglass fishing rod.
On the Maumee River near Toledo, they had a small company called Glaskyd, which made very tough fiberglass in short lengths. During the Second World War, Howald had been technical director of the Plaskon Division of the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company. Fishing up in Michigan in 1944, he broke the tip of his bamboo fly rod. What to do? Ohio and Michigan were not well supplied at that time with Gulf of Tonkin bamboo. He tried fashioning a new tip with glass fiber and Plaskon resin. When he saw that it worked well, he tried making a whole rod in the same manner. He sought the advice of Henry Shakespeare, who made fishing equipment in Kalamazoo, and by 1946 Howald had a patent and Shakespeare was manufacturing the Howald Glastik Wonderod, the first of the kind that sent bamboo off to the velvet closet.
Henry Shakespeare's grandfather William had been a First Sergeant in the Second Michigan Infantry who was given a battlefield promotion to Brigadier Generalâat the age of nineteen, in 1863âwhen he was severely wounded and was expected to die before sunset. The sun set without taking him with it. He survived to become a rich Michigan lawyer. Eventually, he was president of the Central Bank of William Shakespeare. His son William Jr. founded the tackle company Shakespeare, a hallowed name in American fishing. William Shakespeare Jr. invented and patented the level-winding reel, which distributes incoming line evenly across its width. Sensing gains in venture capital, the Central Bank of William Shakespeare helped to underwrite production.
Arthur Howald and his family lived in Perrysburg, Ohio, not far from the Bemises, whose panoramic lawn descended to the Maumee River. The lawn had been a fairway, a major component of a three-hole golf course, the harebrained idea of a developer.
When Willy was twelve years old, and thereabout, he would water the lawn for three hours, causing nightcrawlers to come out of it like spaghetti. He put them in his wormerie, which was in his mother's garden, and fished with them in the Maumee, catching carp, bullheads, channel catfish, bluegills, pumpkinseeds, and crappies. In order to watch them feed and swim, he kept some of these specimens in an elliptical, bowl-shaped cement pond. He raised tropical fish indoors. He caught perch in Lake Erie on minnows. On family trips with the Howaldsâto Montana, Missouri, northern Michiganâhe learned fly fishing. Arthur Howald, who also developed plastic-coated fly line, showed Willy and his family through the Shakespeare factory in South Carolina on one of the Bemises' annual road trips to Florida. From age six, Willy fished with his brother Bobby on the bridge between the islands Sanibel and Captiva, catching weakfish, catfish, mangrove snappers, and a variety of jacks. In their early teens, they learned snorkeling on Lower Matecumbe Key, across Florida Bay from the Everglades. Willy built collecting boxes, filled them up, and, in his words, “became committed to studying marine animals.” He went home and presented this news to Sam McCoy, his biology teacher at Maumee Valley Country Day, whose surprise meter stayed on zero. Willy entered Cornell University, Class of 1976, thinking that he would specialize in marine invertebrates. That plan vanished when he took a course called “The Vertebrates,” which introduced him to comparative anatomy. Spiralling upward through the textbooks of his field, this future professor did not take long to find an enduring hero in David Starr Jordan (1851â1931), fountainhead of American ichthyology, first president of Stanford University, and author of the ultimate academic lament: “Every time I learn a student's name I forget a fish.”
When Willy was twelve years old, and thereabout, he would water the lawn for three hours, causing nightcrawlers to come out of it like spaghetti. He put them in his wormerie, which was in his mother's garden, and fished with them in the Maumee, catching carp, bullheads, channel catfish, bluegills, pumpkinseeds, and crappies. In order to watch them feed and swim, he kept some of these specimens in an elliptical, bowl-shaped cement pond. He raised tropical fish indoors. He caught perch in Lake Erie on minnows. On family trips with the Howaldsâto Montana, Missouri, northern Michiganâhe learned fly fishing. Arthur Howald, who also developed plastic-coated fly line, showed Willy and his family through the Shakespeare factory in South Carolina on one of the Bemises' annual road trips to Florida. From age six, Willy fished with his brother Bobby on the bridge between the islands Sanibel and Captiva, catching weakfish, catfish, mangrove snappers, and a variety of jacks. In their early teens, they learned snorkeling on Lower Matecumbe Key, across Florida Bay from the Everglades. Willy built collecting boxes, filled them up, and, in his words, “became committed to studying marine animals.” He went home and presented this news to Sam McCoy, his biology teacher at Maumee Valley Country Day, whose surprise meter stayed on zero. Willy entered Cornell University, Class of 1976, thinking that he would specialize in marine invertebrates. That plan vanished when he took a course called “The Vertebrates,” which introduced him to comparative anatomy. Spiralling upward through the textbooks of his field, this future professor did not take long to find an enduring hero in David Starr Jordan (1851â1931), fountainhead of American ichthyology, first president of Stanford University, and author of the ultimate academic lament: “Every time I learn a student's name I forget a fish.”
And now in the new spring of a new migration, in the lab at the University of Massachusetts, Willy picks up a fresh, whole, undissected buck shad, and with knife in hand remarks, “There are
very few things as informative as a cross-section of a fish.” The knife goes straight through the shad from top to belly, about halfway between the mouth and the tail. If this makes you squeamish, think what you do to a cantaloupe. A second cut follows, an inch back, and he lays on the table a perfect slice of
Alosa sapidissima,
not unlike a salmon steak, with the difference that the two sides, as in nature, tumble home and join at the bottom, and surround an interior neatly and thoroughly packed in Frenchcurve geometries of advanced design. Willy addresses fiber-optic lighting to the section of shad. The spinal cord makes a white dot above the vertebral column. The dorsal aorta is a small open circle just below the vertebra. Just below the dorsal aorta is the kidney, slung above the peritoneal membrane, and then come the large veins that drain forward through the body. Below it is the air bladder, flanked by chalk-white ellipses of milt. As in a swordfish steak, the muscle above is divided into quadrants by a vertical septum, from the top of the fish to the vertebral column, and by a horizontal septum, reaching out from the center to the two sides. Sets of intermuscular bones reach horizontally from the shad's upper ribs to the skin, left and right. Above them, the other two sets of intermuscular bones rise in a V from the vertebral column.
very few things as informative as a cross-section of a fish.” The knife goes straight through the shad from top to belly, about halfway between the mouth and the tail. If this makes you squeamish, think what you do to a cantaloupe. A second cut follows, an inch back, and he lays on the table a perfect slice of
Alosa sapidissima,
not unlike a salmon steak, with the difference that the two sides, as in nature, tumble home and join at the bottom, and surround an interior neatly and thoroughly packed in Frenchcurve geometries of advanced design. Willy addresses fiber-optic lighting to the section of shad. The spinal cord makes a white dot above the vertebral column. The dorsal aorta is a small open circle just below the vertebra. Just below the dorsal aorta is the kidney, slung above the peritoneal membrane, and then come the large veins that drain forward through the body. Below it is the air bladder, flanked by chalk-white ellipses of milt. As in a swordfish steak, the muscle above is divided into quadrants by a vertical septum, from the top of the fish to the vertebral column, and by a horizontal septum, reaching out from the center to the two sides. Sets of intermuscular bones reach horizontally from the shad's upper ribs to the skin, left and right. Above them, the other two sets of intermuscular bones rise in a V from the vertebral column.
The sectioned shad brings to Willy's mind the event that engaged his interest in sturgeons. He was scarcely thirty, and new in Amherst. Boyd Kynard took him down to Holyoke, where shortnose sturgeons were spawning below the dam. With a seine, five were trapped, and one unfortunately died when the net got caught in its gill covers. It was a big animal, four feet long. Willy took it back to the lab, where he removed the head and then sawed it in two from the nose backward with a band saw. “I wanted to see how they project their mouths to suck up food from the bottom,” he explains. “They have no teeth. They have a projecting, suction-cup mouth, like an open-ended sock. They winnow edible things from
the gravel. They can stick their lips out maybe two inches. It's amazing. It's so cool.”
the gravel. They can stick their lips out maybe two inches. It's amazing. It's so cool.”
For traction, Willy pulls on a new set of cotton gloves, and with fine scissors begins to cut the left side of another whole shad, this one a female. Being careful barely to penetrate the body wall, he cuts an elongate oval, three by seven inches. After snipping resistant tissue, he lifts it, exhibiting in an oval window the undisturbed interior of the fishâstomach, pyloric caecae, air sac, and so forth, all tightly packed against but in no way interfering with a bright, ripe sac of roe. The roe sac is two-thirds of this elliptical cameo. It extends through the body cavity almost from one end to the other. From shad I've caught, I have removed roe sacs that weighed a third as much as the rest of the body, or something near itâfor example, a pound of roe in a four-and-a-half-pound shad. When Alexander Wilson named this fish
sapidissima
in 1811, he was referring almost certainly to the nutty-buttery succulence of the main muscle, but the roe is the tongue of the buffalo, the tip of the asparagus, the cheek of the halibut, the marrow of the osso bucco.
sapidissima
in 1811, he was referring almost certainly to the nutty-buttery succulence of the main muscle, but the roe is the tongue of the buffalo, the tip of the asparagus, the cheek of the halibut, the marrow of the osso bucco.
And we are not the only creatures who think so. One May evening, fishing in waders far out in the river, I reeled in a roe shad. A stringer was dangling from a D-ring on my vestâa long set of sliding brass meat hooks designed, like oversized safety pins, to go in past the gills, come out through the mouth, and fasten. I put the shad on the stringer. It was a noisy, awkward, not to say absurd arrangement, but the current was heavy and I was too lazy to wade ashore. I caught another roe shad and hung her on the keeper, too. Now I had nearly ten pounds of living shad swimming in place right next to me while I kept on casting. I quit before long, and dragged the fish to the riverbank. As I routinely do, I hit them with a priest before opening them up. My priest is a Louisville Slugger fourteen inches long, a miniature baseball bat made by the Hillerich
& Bradsby company and player-personalized “Alosa sapidissima.” Priests of various weights and configurations are sold in sport shops that cater to meat fishermen. Sam Flick, a teacher of fly casting and a sales representative in the headquarters store at L. L. Bean, told me several years ago that he was one of a small minority in the fishing department who thought that Bean's should sell priests. Considering what else they sell, why not? On more recent visits I have noticed on the walls an arsenal of crankbaits, each with two treble hooks, and among them a container for worms.
& Bradsby company and player-personalized “Alosa sapidissima.” Priests of various weights and configurations are sold in sport shops that cater to meat fishermen. Sam Flick, a teacher of fly casting and a sales representative in the headquarters store at L. L. Bean, told me several years ago that he was one of a small minority in the fishing department who thought that Bean's should sell priests. Considering what else they sell, why not? On more recent visits I have noticed on the walls an arsenal of crankbaits, each with two treble hooks, and among them a container for worms.
I took a roe shad off the stringer, turned it onto its back, and opened its cavity with the German scissors. Nothing was inside. The fish had no intestines, no roe sacs. The inside of the cavity was completely empty, the walls without blemish. For some moments I thought I was dreaming. There were no ruptures of any kind in the scales and sides. What had happened? I looked into the mouth. The back of the throat was much torn up. Suddenly, a picture formed, and as it did I think I might have cried outâa picture of an eel going into the shad on the stringer. Had I looked down while fishing, I would have seen at least two feet of the eel protruding from the mouth of the live fish while the eel's head was inside the cavity eating the roe and intestines and licking the plate clean. I didn't see that happen. I probably would have slipped a disk if I had. The roe in the other fish was o.k. I ate it under bacon for dinner.
Two weeks later at five in the morning I was fishing from my canoe in an enveloping mist. The stringer was over the side. I was catching bucks and roes. Seven feet of water was below the hull. Again, an eel went in through the mouth of a roe shad on the keeper and ate her insides clean. Never again. I made two phone calls. In Cabela's catalogue I found a wire basket that hangs in the water like a birdcage, and I called 1-800. I also called the shad biologist Richard St. Pierre, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
who told me that I was reporting something he had neither seen nor heard of. A few years later, when I asked Boyd Kynard about shads' interactions with other species in the rivers, he said, “The only relationship I've seen is when shad die eels are right in the body cavity. They feed on the carcasses a lot. We pull up gill nets and a dead shad is there, andâit's awesomeâan eel is in the shad and comes crawling out.”
who told me that I was reporting something he had neither seen nor heard of. A few years later, when I asked Boyd Kynard about shads' interactions with other species in the rivers, he said, “The only relationship I've seen is when shad die eels are right in the body cavity. They feed on the carcasses a lot. We pull up gill nets and a dead shad is there, andâit's awesomeâan eel is in the shad and comes crawling out.”
Eels being catadromous, and shad anadromous, they share rivers, and both are exceptional very-long-distance swimmers. Willy reminds me that the shad's loose scales allow it to swim more like an eel than most other fish: “Shad scales are thin and deciduous because of the amount of lateral undulation. Shad have such a flexible body it needs a scale that will move with it, not armor plate. Eels and other eel-like fishes have independently lost their scales, or have reduced their scales a lot. In other words, eels have no scales and are correspondingly flexible.” Willy thinks the deciduous scale has an evolutionary future about as promising as a saber tooth. “Deciduous scalesâthey're sort of on the way out.”
An ocean sunfish has fifteen vertebrae and is stiffer than a clipboard. An eel has roughly a hundred and twenty vertebrae. “One way to get an idea about the body flexibility of a fish is to count the vertebrae,” Willy continues. “A brook trout has about forty.” Exposing the vertebrae of a shad in the lab, he counts fifty-five. “These are fish that have a lot of mobility, and when you catch one they don't just pull steadily. You feel 'em swimming.”
I ask Willy, “How do you skin an eel?”
From a back room, Willy's colleague Al Richmond, a herpetologist, calls out, “Same way you skin a snake.”
Willy goes on with his dissecting, adding nothing to Richmond's instructions, obviously considering them complete.
The adult eel has among its predators snapping turtles, otters, minks, and me. Actually, you don't have to know how to skin a snake if you want to eat an eel. You can cut it into three-inch segments
and saute them in butter. I baited a shad dart with a shad's stomach one evening when some eels were hanging around while I was processing fish. As I dangled the stomach in the shallow water, an eel grabbed it, pulled it under a rock, and chewed through the line. Next time, I used a wire leader and a plain hook. Eel is
sapidissimaâ
a firm, most savory fish. When the segments are sizzling in the hot butter, the skin turns blue.
and saute them in butter. I baited a shad dart with a shad's stomach one evening when some eels were hanging around while I was processing fish. As I dangled the stomach in the shallow water, an eel grabbed it, pulled it under a rock, and chewed through the line. Next time, I used a wire leader and a plain hook. Eel is
sapidissimaâ
a firm, most savory fish. When the segments are sizzling in the hot butter, the skin turns blue.
A mature, green shadâa hard, female shad whose full sacs have not yet ripened into spawningâmay be carrying as many as six hundred thousand eggs, but this would not impress an ocean sunfish
(Mola mola),
whose sacs contain three hundred million eggs. An Atlantic salmon might look twice. A hen salmon carries about eight hundred eggs per pound of body weight. A roe shad, per pound of body weight, is carrying at least sixty thousand. A twelve-pound shad commercially caught in the Hudson River some years ago had four and a half pounds of roe inside her. That would approximate a million eggs.
(Mola mola),
whose sacs contain three hundred million eggs. An Atlantic salmon might look twice. A hen salmon carries about eight hundred eggs per pound of body weight. A roe shad, per pound of body weight, is carrying at least sixty thousand. A twelve-pound shad commercially caught in the Hudson River some years ago had four and a half pounds of roe inside her. That would approximate a million eggs.
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