The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  “Ichthyologists always cut the right side of a fish to save the left side for illustrations,” Willy notes. “Fish illustrations always show the left side. So you’re obviously an ichthyologist.”

  I pause, and think it over. “If I’m an ichthyologist, how come I don’t know what a teleost is?”

  “The superorder of fishes to which American shad belong is the Teleostei,” he says.

  I to him: “Keep going.”

  “Well, they are bony fishes, Osteichthyes, and their subgroup is Actinopterygii, or ray-finned fishes. The shad’s family is the Clupeidae, the genus is Alosa, and the species is sapidissima. Teleos means ‘higher’; ostei, of course, refers to bone; so these are higher bony fishes. Anadromy is so widespread, it has evolved in fifty different groups of fishes. Anadromous fishes almost always have difficult interactions with people. We build dams on their rivers. We build cities on their rivers. Shad and their allies are really primitive teleosts. Worldwide, they include many species from sprats to alewives to the denticle herring of Cameroon.”

  Soon he is describing the walking catfish in southern Florida, which breathes air and sometimes walks on land. After anatomy, free association is Willy’s subspecialty, and he flies on into an encyclopedic comparison of fishes. “There are two big evolutionary stories,” he inserts. “Herring and their allies, and carp and their allies. You could add a third: the spiny-rayed fishes. Easily ten thousand species have spiny fins.”

  Willy informs me that he is going to Alabama a few weeks hence. There is a fishing tournament in the Gulf of Mexico that brings in a large variety of species. He will be dissecting them.

  “Why don’t you come to Alabama? It’s a scene and a half. It’s so cool. In a general way, you would learn a lot about fishes.”

  He doesn’t need to say that twice.

  FOURTEEN

  CATCH-AND-DISSECT

  The 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 there—on five tons of solid ice—are 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 Rodeo—twenty-seven hundred competitors, in eight hundred boats—Willy 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.

  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 colors—red, 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 trustworthy—enough 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 ‘N’ 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. Steve—compact, wiry, his hair close cut—presents 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 tall—a 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 fishing—“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 ichthyologist—co-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”—but 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 species—including a white sea trout and the gafftopsail catfish—and 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. Ot
herwise, 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.

  The hammer is on the table, catercornered. Nonetheless, it overhangs. Willy picks up a Rapala filleting knife, its thin blade eight inches long—the 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 claspers—hard 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.

  “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.

  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 sharks—their brains, their nervous systems—we owe to Navy funding. Look at that weird head—leading the fish like the crossbar of the letter T—with 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 line—a distant sense of touch—senses 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 ‘swimming 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.

  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 fish—whole 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.”

  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 drum—sliced 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 cabinet—exactly what happens in a person who drinks like a fish.

  The collection of fish skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, is in many respects unrivalled, and can be compared only with skeletal collections in London, Paris, and Chicago. There are more than ten thousand fish skeletons in the American Museum, and about a quarter of them came from the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo. Most of these specimens were dissected and prepared by Gareth Nelson, an American Museum ichthyologist, who, over the years, scraped and dried on Dauphin Island more than twenty-five hundred skeletons representing two hundred and fifty-three species. A year ago, on the verge of retirement, Nelson brought Willy Bemis with him and showed him how to work the rodeo. Then Nelson went off to Australia. The American Museum, in Willy’s words, “is out of the fishskeleton-collecting business now,” and Willy has an obsessional dream. He sees in his mind’s eye a Massachusetts Museum of Natural History. He has already sketched a logo for it. He has designed an M.M.N.H. green-and-gold flag, which is flapping even now on a pole within a few feet of the space in whic
h he is dissecting. He knows just where on the U Mass campus, in Amherst, he intends the building to be. Already, he has raised $1.3 million. He needs twenty.

  Sponsored fishing teams are in the rodeo. Young, photogenic pros, they go from tournament to tournament, representing boat makers, engine makers, or tackle companies. Appearing on the dock in essentially identical clothes, they look like assistant basketball coaches: Team Big Boy, in green and gold; Ranger Sportfishermen, in blue. Their boats are as showroom-fresh as they are.

  Second afternoon, and Blue Monday ties up—a homemade boat flying two Confederate flags. She is skippered by a competitor who is also a commercial fisherman. He has shrimp stickers on his wheelhouse and trawl doors aft. Blue Monday, imperfectly fashioned from quarter-inch steel plate, is possibly a sister ship of the African Queen. The skipper’s face is quizzical and darkly bronzed. His eyes seem to be narrowing on something they can’t quite hit. He says he has asbestosis. He says he has been shot eleven times, mainly in Vietnam. He says he has had a heart attack and lung disease, and each day he lives for the day. His bluefish and red snappers are not going to appear on the leader board. He casts off resignedly, and leaves.

  Ynot comes down the Aloe Bay Channel. Ynot is a Fountain, a thirty-one-foot open fisherman, with a fineness ratio (length to width) of such elegance that it seems to slice—rather than part—the quiet water. Watching it approach, Jerry Walden remarks that it’s “a high-dollar boat.” Two people are aboard: a man, at the wheel, and a smiling—not to say exuberant—young woman eyeing the dock. They are father and daughter. Five feet tall, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and New Balance boat shoes, she is as trig and pretty as the boat—blond and fine-featured, with the shape of a gymnast. Ynot waits for an opening and then moves into a slip.