The Founding Fish (30 page)
Authors: John McPhee
He doesn't need to say that twice.
CATCH-AND-DISSECT
T
he boats come in through Petit Bois Pass, make an arcuate turn in Mississippi Sound, and line up on final in the Aloe Bay Channel. The afternoon sun is behind them. The boats in the middle distance are indistinct, and the far ones are lost in summerhaze. They are like airliners coming in from the west, descending in an endless queue.
he boats come in through Petit Bois Pass, make an arcuate turn in Mississippi Sound, and line up on final in the Aloe Bay Channel. The afternoon sun is behind them. The boats in the middle distance are indistinct, and the far ones are lost in summerhaze. They are like airliners coming in from the west, descending in an endless queue.
Willy Bemis is waiting at the dock. The judges' stand is behind him. In the fish bin thereâon five tons of solid iceâare redfish, lookdowns, stargazers, amberjacks, and kings, not to mention congers, morays, spadefish, ladyfish, catfish, bonitas, barracudas, and guaguanches. In the sense that he means to pay nothing, Willy is begging fish. As the competitors tie up and reveal their entries in the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeoâtwenty-seven hundred competitors, in eight hundred boatsâWilly casts a selective eye on the catch. When he decides he wants something and makes a pitch for it, his line is so incongruous that most of the fishermen seem to grant him the benefit of the doubt. Dressed in shorts and sandals and a T-shirt covered with sharks and other fish, he tells them that he is a professor of ichthyology from the University of Massachusetts, and that his purpose in coming to the rodeo is to collect skeletons.
As American fishing tournaments go, this rodeo is, in various respects, at or near the No. 1: number of boats, number of fisherwomen,
number of fishermen, number of species. The last is what attracts Willy. Most tournaments award prizes in one category, and some in four or five categories. These fish, though, are coming from the Fertile Crescent, the fishery piñata of the Gulf of Mexico, in forty-five thousand square miles of which the action takes place; the catch is brought here to Dauphin Island, at the mouth of Mobile Bay; the prizewinners are in thirty categories; and they will range in length from four inches to eight and a half feet.
number of fishermen, number of species. The last is what attracts Willy. Most tournaments award prizes in one category, and some in four or five categories. These fish, though, are coming from the Fertile Crescent, the fishery piñata of the Gulf of Mexico, in forty-five thousand square miles of which the action takes place; the catch is brought here to Dauphin Island, at the mouth of Mobile Bay; the prizewinners are in thirty categories; and they will range in length from four inches to eight and a half feet.
In the manner of a major golf tournament, a large leader board keeps the crowd informed. Among the categorical leaders of the moment are Robert Groh, with a hundred-and-fifty-six-pound tuna; Creighton T. Parker, with a thirty-three-pound wahoo; Melvin Dunn, with a thirty-three-pound barracuda; John Holley, with a fifty-one-pound grouper; Michael Burgess, with a six-and-a-half-pound flounder; and Jeff Gaddy, with a gafftopsail catfish a hair under eight pounds. Competitors are out there in twelve-foot homemade johnboats fishing “inshore” for redfish, flounder, and speckled trout. Competitors are out there in big cruisers that carry four hundred and fifty gallons of gasoline and troll along the lip of the continental slope. With fourteen rods in rod holders, brass reels, the big boats, as they come in, bristle like porcupines. Ladders go up to their flying bridges, where other ladders go on up to tuna platforms. They have outriggers, gin poles, venturi windshields, and fighting chairs that would not attract attention in a barbershop. The occupants of these vessels tend to be wearing one-way sunglasses that flash carnival colorsâred, green, orange, purple, and blue. When these fishermen are milling about the dock, it appears to be a disco. Other fishermen have big tattoos and no sunglasses.
Resting on the bridge of Willy's nose are two clear lenses, surrounded by gold circles. His hair falls long in all directions from a bald spot at the top. He is a professor with an inquiring mustache, and enough extra weight to make him seem trustworthyâenough
to help him float. More, he is amiable, straightforward, and benign. He explains his way of working the fishermen. “I just stand here and see how badly they want their fish.” After a moment, he adds, “We came to get tarpon, ladyfish, and sharks, but we'll take as much diversity as we can handle.”
to help him float. More, he is amiable, straightforward, and benign. He explains his way of working the fishermen. “I just stand here and see how badly they want their fish.” After a moment, he adds, “We came to get tarpon, ladyfish, and sharks, but we'll take as much diversity as we can handle.”
Now comes Steve McConnell, in Play 'N' Hookie, with a hammerhead shark. Play âN' Hookie is powered by a two-hundred-and-twenty-five-horse Johnson outboard, and is twenty-one feet long. The shark is nearly nine feet long. Steveâcompact, wiry, his hair close cutâpresents his ticket to the Mobile Jaycees who officiate the tournament. A portable crane on a bright-red truck moves toward the dock. It lifts the hammerhead out of the boat and moves it to a fish rack, a wooden arch twelve feet tallâa gibbet. There the hammerhead is hung, ogled by the crowd, and weighed (a hundred and sixty-three pounds). It looks a little like a steer and a little more like nothing else in the world, this creature with a widespread rectangular cranium like the bar antenna on a spinning radar. Jerry Walden, the crane operator, has been coming here ten years and has picked up some heavy fish. He remembers a fisherman who came in with a three-hundred-pound shark longer than his boat.
And now a man in sandals with sharks on his shirt appears before McConnell mentioning marine science, mentioning the possibility that McConnell's great fish could find a home in Massachusetts. So far, McConnell's day has included getting out of bed at four A.M. and fighting a shark for two hours. He was thirty miles off Dauphin Island, using fifty-pound-test line, a fifteen-hundred-pound-test leader, and two hooks baited with a ten-pound bonita. The hammerhead hammered it. And when all was over, and the fish, exhausted, neared the boat, McConnell saw that a ling, or cobia, about twenty-five pounds, had come up with it, and a second shark was chasing the ling. McConnell's wife and two friends were with him. They went to the rail to see the second
shark. Immediately, they all stepped back and clustered in the middle of the boat. The second hammer, as McConnell would describe it, was the largest shark he had seen in fifteen years of shark fishingâ“a monster.” Now, contemplatively, McConnell looks at Willy Bemis. “Massachusetts?” he says, and donates his fish. An Ohioan who was trained at Cornell, Michigan, Berkeley, and Chicago, Willy is a world-class ichthyologistâco-author, with Lance Grande, of a six-hundred-and-ninety-page book called “A Comprehensive Phylogenetic Study of Amiid Fishes (Amiidae) Based on Comparative Skeletal Anatomy”âbut he is only in his second year at Dauphin Island, and this is his first hammer ever. The crane lowers the fish into Willy's pickup. The nose is near the cab and the tail is out the back. Willy says, “If I live to be a hundred, there's nothing like the first hammerhead you have as a specimen.”
shark. Immediately, they all stepped back and clustered in the middle of the boat. The second hammer, as McConnell would describe it, was the largest shark he had seen in fifteen years of shark fishingâ“a monster.” Now, contemplatively, McConnell looks at Willy Bemis. “Massachusetts?” he says, and donates his fish. An Ohioan who was trained at Cornell, Michigan, Berkeley, and Chicago, Willy is a world-class ichthyologistâco-author, with Lance Grande, of a six-hundred-and-ninety-page book called “A Comprehensive Phylogenetic Study of Amiid Fishes (Amiidae) Based on Comparative Skeletal Anatomy”âbut he is only in his second year at Dauphin Island, and this is his first hammer ever. The crane lowers the fish into Willy's pickup. The nose is near the cab and the tail is out the back. Willy says, “If I live to be a hundred, there's nothing like the first hammerhead you have as a specimen.”
Willy adds other speciesâincluding a white sea trout and the gafftopsail catfishâand takes off for his lab. The dorsal fin of this catfish will rise so far and so acutely that it closely models the highest sail on the mainmast of a schooner. Otherwise, the cat looks like an ordinary bullhead, barbels and all. The fish ride three miles down a palm-lined boulevard to the old Army post around Fort Gaines, beside the mouth of Mobile Bay, where floating mines were ignored by David Farragut, in 1864, when he sailed through, saying, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” People now pronounce the name of the island as if it were “dolphin,” which, as it happens, is the primary meaning of
dauphin.
The Army post has become the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, marine-science laboratory of a consortium of Alabama colleges and universities. In a breezeway between two buildings, Willy has created a dissection room, with a floor of crushed shells, screen walls at the two ends, and a four-foot belt-driven fan. With the help of two assistants, he has dug two offal pits, found a darkroom sink and plumbed it himself, and set
up an operating table with a surface area of twenty-four square feet.
dauphin.
The Army post has become the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, marine-science laboratory of a consortium of Alabama colleges and universities. In a breezeway between two buildings, Willy has created a dissection room, with a floor of crushed shells, screen walls at the two ends, and a four-foot belt-driven fan. With the help of two assistants, he has dug two offal pits, found a darkroom sink and plumbed it himself, and set
up an operating table with a surface area of twenty-four square feet.
The hammer is on the table, catercornered. Nonetheless, it overhangs. Willy picks up a Rapala filleting knife, its thin blade eight inches longâthe same kind of knife I use at home to fillet shad that weigh five pounds. Also on the table are razor blades and a scalpel. Idly, he slides the palm of one hand away from the shark's head and along its flank; gingerly, he moves the hand in the other direction. “It's smooth one way, but like rose thorns and will tear your flesh the other way. This is caused by a shagreen of denticles. Placoid scales. The skin of the hammerhead was used like fine sandpaper at one time.” The wallet in Willy's pocket is made of carp skin.
The hammerhead is male. It has two claspersâhard penislike pelvic appendages. “That is really, really, really fancy,” Willy says admiringly. “They penetrate the female and shoot.” Internal fertilization, standard for sharks, is not uncommon in other fishes, he remarks. The Phallostethidae, for example, are a family that includes
Gulaphallus falcifer,
whose females lay fertilized eggs, like chickens. Various families of fishes, including sharks, deliver live offspring. He slides his knife through the big shark as if he were cleaning a cod. “You're taking off a hundred pounds before you dry the skeleton.” A large mass of muscle plops onto the table.
Gulaphallus falcifer,
whose females lay fertilized eggs, like chickens. Various families of fishes, including sharks, deliver live offspring. He slides his knife through the big shark as if he were cleaning a cod. “You're taking off a hundred pounds before you dry the skeleton.” A large mass of muscle plops onto the table.
“Every few years, a guy makes a name for himself by claiming to find bone in a shark. The consensus is that there is no bone.”
“So how can you be collecting the skeleton? What is the skeleton?”
“Calcified cartilage. The distinction between this type of cartilage and bone is somewhat subtle. True bone has bone cells, calcified cartilage does not. You would need a microscope.” Another muscle mass falls off the fish, joining the first one on the table. The shark's vertebral column is becoming well exposed. “The hammerhead
has negligible rib structure,” he observes, and, with a heavy cut, he starts another blob on its way to the pits.
has negligible rib structure,” he observes, and, with a heavy cut, he starts another blob on its way to the pits.
Ready for finer work, he picks up a large steel kitchen spoon and uses it as a scraper, working rapidly, removing berms of shark tartare. Hammerheads will kill people. Normally, they eat fish, squid. He drops the spoon and opens the mouth wide, demonstrating its great flexibility, displaying its dental coronet and the hyoid arch. “The hyoid arch is suspended from the jaw by the interhyal, which allows the hyoid arch to move independent of the jaw. It's the only joint that connects the hyoid arch to the rest of the skull.” Snap. He goes back to work with the spoon. The Navy became very interested in sharks and shark repellents after the U.S.S. Indianapolis disaster, in the Second World War, he says, and much of what we know about the sensory biology of sharksâtheir brains, their nervous systemsâwe owe to Navy funding. Look at that weird headâleading the fish like the crossbar of the letter Tâwith eyes at the extremes, nearly half a metre apart. The hammerhead's vision is stereoscopic. The nostrils are long slits, also well separated, like leading-edge grooves near the tips of a wing, allowing three-point olfactory discrimination, receiving scents from great distances. All over the roof of the skull are the gray peppery speckles of the ampullae of Lorenzini, which detect electric fields, maybe including the earth's magnetic field. “These animals live in a very different sensory world than people do. They're detecting things we never detect. The lateral lineâa distant sense of touchâsenses movement in the water column by detecting changes in water pressure. The hammerhead has a very large brain, comparable to some mammals'. People think of sharks as âswimming noses.' There's a lot about them they don't understand.”
The thin tubes of lateral lines run along the sides of most fish. A submarine passing fifty fathoms below a ship will feel the pressure
of the ship, and note it with instruments less sensitive than a hammerhead's lateral line. The Indianapolis was the heavy cruiser that delivered the fission bomb Little Boy to Tinian. After the ship left Tinian, alone, it was fatally torpedoed. Sailors were in the water for as much as five days. Of the eight hundred and eighty-three who died, a great many were killed by sharks.
of the ship, and note it with instruments less sensitive than a hammerhead's lateral line. The Indianapolis was the heavy cruiser that delivered the fission bomb Little Boy to Tinian. After the ship left Tinian, alone, it was fatally torpedoed. Sailors were in the water for as much as five days. Of the eight hundred and eighty-three who died, a great many were killed by sharks.
Eric Hilton, who is completing his Ph.D. under Willy at U Mass, removes from the hammerhead a plug of flesh to be studied for its DNA. Hilton's rufous ponytail and pharisaical beard offset the barbered hairlessness of Willy's other assistant. Tall, bare to the waist, he is an undergraduate named Mark Grgurovic. Dangling from a chain around Mark's neck is a golden fish.
Willy opens the hammerhead's body cavity. The liver, brought out on the tabletop, is a large scale model of Oahu. Why so much of it?
“It contains a lot of lipid material, which is light. It is thought to help with the fact that sharks have no swim bladder. They are very agile in the water column. They have to be neutrally buoyant to be agile. The liver helps that happen.”
Would Willy comment on the conventional wisdom and litigatory metaphor that sharks can never stop swimming, have to remain in motion as long as they live, because they have no air bladder?
“A lot of sharks stop swimming. A lot of sharks are bottom feeders.”
The shark's stomach is now on the table, too, and it is such a gross and loaded bag that it could easily have inside it something I would prefer not to see. As Willy slices into it, I nearly look away. It contains large hunks of large fishâwhole severed segments of twenty-pound, thirty-pound fish.
Opening a thick tube about fourteen inches long, he reveals the hammerhead's spiral-valve intestine, which corkscrews around
a stringlike membrane in the axial center of the tube. “Food goes down the spiral, which has a tremendous surface area. It's a Slinky inside of a pipe.”
a stringlike membrane in the axial center of the tube. “Food goes down the spiral, which has a tremendous surface area. It's a Slinky inside of a pipe.”
Willy now opens the penetrating end of a clasper, the part analogous to the glans of a penis. He slices it the long way and spreads it out to show the range of its ability to expand. “Doesn't that look nasty,” he comments. “Claspers go in the cloaca and then spread out.”
The shark is so long that Willy and Eric break the skeleton into five pieces before putting them in a tub of alcohol for drying. The tub is half of a fifty-five-gallon drumâsliced the long way, like the clasper. The alcohol draws nearly all the water from the tissue, making a great stride in the skeleton's advance toward an exhibition cabinetâexactly what happens in a person who drinks like a fish.
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