Gone Fishin’
Fish are great. Even the word is cool. Fish. It is s a noun. It is a verb. It is a band. It is in oodles of nifty sayings, including the gangster classic “swims wit da fishes”. I love that one. Though in keeping with the healthy (and spiritual) theme of this issue, we’ll stick to fish as brain food, religious symbols and great swimmers.
Anyway, fish were the first vertebrates. Not fish as we think of them nowadays—guppies and trout are newcomers. Fish go a long way back, and they’ve traveled lots of different directions en route.
So what is a fish? Pop quiz time—answer yes or no out loud. Is a catfish a fish? A dogfish? Pipefish? Starfish? Tuna fish? Jellyfish? Shellfish? How ‘bout a sea horse? Moray eel? Stingray?
Feeling like a fish out of water? Yes, yes, yes, no, yes, no, no, yes, yes, yes.
There’s something fishy about the term fish. It’s because we call at least three distantly related groups of aquatic vertebrates fish. Jawless fish (like lampreys in Northwest rivers or hagfish on muddy ocean bottoms) have the earliest pedigree—the few species left are remnants of a group that hit its peak about 400 million years ago. For the chronologically impaired, that’s like—WAY before the dinosaurs.
Elasmobranchs go back a ways as well but they’re still a happening group. They have cartilaginous skeletons and stiff fins—we call them sharks, skates and rays.
Bony fish have only recently hit their stride—there are presently over twenty thousand species of them. Colonizing fresh water habitats is their forte, using their maneuverable fins and swim bladders for neutral buoyancy (sharks sink). All us terrestrial vertebrates evolved from one of their ancestors a long while back, though which one (lungfish? lobe fin? Charley the Tuna?) is hotly contested.
But we have other fish to fry. We don’t really paddle with fish of course—we drift over their realm, startling them with our sharklike shapes. Fishwatching for kayakers is possible on calm days, when we can see through that window between our worlds, the ocean surface. It is also possible along shore—you’ll find several fishes on this month’s checklist while poking under rocks or peering into tidepools. You might also try a glass bottom box—I’m trying to come up with one that would work well from a kayak.
Of course many of us are not just fish watchers, we are fish predators. Piscivores. Renders of fishy flesh. Fish are tasty, as lots of other critters know well—we share the ocean with all sorts of fish eaters, from bald eagles to resident killer whales, from squid to puffins to other fish themselves, big and small. One of the most interesting ways to watch fish is to watch their predators eating them.
This outing though, restrain your stomach and check out these fish while they are alive and well and living in the sea. Fish may be tasty, but they are also fascinating creatures to watch, and (like any animal) always more beautiful and interesting when alive, healthy and in their element. If you’re looking up close, be gentle (hooks or no hooks)—fish are at the mercy of gravity when out of the water, and dry hands can damage their skin. |
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