The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  Shipp said, “I’m sorry. It’s a small king.”

  The fisherman said, “I’ve got Dr. Bob Shipp’s book in my boat. I’ll get it and show you.”

  One of the rodeo’s prize categories is Most Unusual. It illuminates the tournament, because a fish of any size can win it. A fish four inches long can be honored beside a tarpon. The winner is determined by what Shipp calls “unofficial subjective calibration.” Shipp picks the winner.

  The Most Unusual category was introduced in the nineteen-eighties. Tony Stuardi, a marlin fisherman, caught on early. He went so far out in the Gulf—at least a hundred miles—that he laid up overnight. Most Unusual, he thought as he lay there, rising on the swells, and he got up and baited two bream hooks—ordinary small hooks of the sort more accustomed to dangling in a pond—and dropped them on a long line over the side. He was dropping them into DeSoto Canyon—two thousand feet of water, off the edge of the continental shelf. He caught a six-inch fanged mackerelet. By anyone’s calibration, it was a clear winner. The next year, Stuardi came in with something equally odd, and Shipp again awarded him the prize. Then he told Stuardi that in years to come Stuardi could show up with anything from an oilfish to a bearded puffer but he was not going to win.

  The blacktail moray lives so obscurely in deep water that it was not even described taxonomically until 1980, when it was known from only twenty-five specimens found in the world. Since then, however, six blacktail morays have appeared in the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, three of them this year. Shipp no longer thinks them unusual. Subjectively, they haven’t got a prayer. He looks for “something never entered before, and if it’s a legitimate catch we’ll move it up to the top of the list.” Three-two-one on his present list are Wendy Kennedy’s short-fin mako shark, Don Henderson’s smooth dogfish, and David Simms’s blunt-nose jack—a fish that Shipp has never seen anywhere.

  The geographical boundaries of the tournament were established after a competitor fished off Costa Rica and flew to Dauphin Island with the catch. Money may not have been the whole motivation. It is not always simple to fathom what makes a fisherman cheat. Why did Marcus Antonius, the Triumvir, cause dead lunkers to be draped on his hook so he could lift them from the water in the presence of Cleopatra? For the prestige? Did he actually think so little of her? According to Plutarch, she sent a servant swimming under Antony’s boat with a dried, salted fish from the Black Sea. The servant put it on Antony’s hook. When Antony pulled up the fish, he was drenched by all present with derisive laughter. “Imperator,” she said, “you had better give up your rod.”

  The late Roy Martin, when he was the rodeo’s judge, opened the stomach of a fish scoring high on the tournament scale. A chunk of lead fell out. That was not an isolated moment. Over the years, enough lead has been discovered in rodeo stomachs to suggest a new link in the food chain.

  There were fishermen who came in every year with entries of frozen red snappers. And a clergyman in the tournament brought to the scale an amberjack that weighed ninety pounds. It was full of frozen blue runners—stuffed with frozen bait. In recent times, the tournament has acquired a Torrymeter, a machine that tests flesh to see if it has been frozen. “Electrodes pass current through a fish,” Shipp explains. “If cells have been ruptured by freezing or deterioration, the current is stronger. A computer chip translates it to a number.” The tournament has also introduced a polygraph. Competitors agree to its use when they buy their tickets. When the polygraph was first contemplated, a mailer was sent out asking if the competitors would approve. Eighty-five per cent said yes. In the first polygraph year, a winner failed the test miserably and was disqualified. He sued the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, but soon withdrew the suit. In the summary words of Bob Shipp, “He was a lyin’ sumbitch and they got him.”

  As a Confederate cannon ends the tournament, spectators are ten deep straining to look into the fish bin. A woman leaning over a vermilion snapper is wearing a green bikini. Jingling in her navel on an extremely short gold chain is a green pendant scarab. She is not alone in her choice of wardrobe. All the way down the back wall of the bin are women leaning forward in bikinis, resting on the cinder block their soft-rayed pectoral fins. We have come here for purposes of comparative anatomy, and we’re getting what we came for. I mean this as a compliment: these women are almost as good-looking as the fish. Before them on the ice are whitebone porgies, whitespotted soapfish, wahoos, black drums, gags, and snake eels. Striped burrfish. Gray triggerfish. Violet gobies. Rainbow runners. Bearded brotulas. Sailfish. Tarpon. Horse-eyed jacks. Literally, it’s a ton of fish, and only a small fraction of all the competing fish not retained in the bin by the judges.

  The rodeo has been criticized for killing so many fish, which is, among other reasons, why Willy is particularly welcome here. The aura of research tends to mute criticism. One of my sons-in-law is the skipper of a trawler in the Bering Sea. He fishes for cod, for Alaska walleye pollock. Both in metric tons and in numbers of fish, he will often catch in a single pass, in five minutes, the equivalent of all the fish caught in the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo.

  Willy is now lecturing the crowd on pelvic and pectoral fins. He is actually in the bin himself, standing, in his sandals, among the fish on the ice, because he knows that spectators will soon be taking the fish, and he is keeping an eye on specimens he has chosen for the lab. Pectoral fins, which spread to either side just below and behind the head, are for steering and braking, he says. The pelvic fins are anti-roll devices. Anti-roll devices on ships include stabilizers and flume tanks. Commercial fishing boats will extend their booms to both sides and lower into the water delta-shaped weights known as flopper-stoppers. Their flop-stopping ability may be considerable but cannot approach the efficacity of a pair of pelvic fins. Dorsal fins, in erection, supply some power and are helpful with anti-roll and steering, but more often they are social: they attract or repel other fish. The caudal fin—the tail fin—is for power. Just as a tall, forked tail is for high speed, a squared tail is for easy going, moseying near the bottom.

  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. ‘Gymno’ 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?

  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 fill
ets 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 testicle—a 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.”

  FIFTEEN

  INSIDE THE HEAD

  When 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 rods—some of which he uses to this day—were 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.

  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 General—at the age of nineteen, in 1863—when 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 Howalds—to Montana, Missouri, northern Michigan—he 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 (1851—1931), 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.

  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 a
nimal, 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.”

  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 fish—stomach, 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 it—for 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.