The Fishy Smiths

by Mike Bruton

  Shirley Bell, the Smiths’ ‘literary daughter’.

  ‘In that long time countless other types of fishy creatures evolved, flourished, and vanished, many of them types that may [have] seemed more suited for survival than our old Coelacanth, but he has outlived them all. He goes plodding steadily on, his needs few and simple, and he will likely still be there when many of these ‘active modern types’, which are supposed to have driven him to the depths, will be gone and long forgotten. He reminds one of a solitary, tough old man, asking favours of none. Old man Coelacanth. Degenerate? Never!’ (Smith, 1956).

  Bell ends Old Man Coelacanth with the following words:

  ‘In some way, the Coelacanth is still a creature of mystery. No living Coelacanth yet lives in an aquarium for men to see and marvel at, and much of its life history among the reefs and channels of its home can only be guessed at. Yet what wonders were unfolded to men of science and to ordinary folk everywhere when a South African scientist had an “impossible” dream and refused to believe that he could not make it come true. This book is a tribute not only to Old Man Coelacanth who has lived for 320,000,000 years, during which the face of the world has changed many times, but to Professor J.L.B. Smith, who recognised him for what he was and determined to find the home of the Coelacanth for his beloved science.’

  1Recently, with the permission of the original publisher and William Smith, and in order to keep the coelacanth story alive, this author republished the entire text of Old Fourlegs in a new book entitled, The Annotated Old Fourlegs – The Updated Story of the Coelacanth, with extensive notes in the margins that comment on Smith’s writing and bring the coelacanth story up to date, as do new introductory and concluding chapters (Bruton, 2017).

  2Although he was an entomologist, Sydney (‘Stacey’) Skaife (1889–1976) wrote popular books on many aspects of natural history for children and adults. They included three delightful ‘nature story’ novelettes for children, one entitled Strange Adventures under the Sea (1964) in which the scientist is ‘Dr Smith’, portrayed as an old man with a white beard and twirly moustache, and as grandfather of the two child characters, Bunty and Bobby. The other two titles in the series were Strange Adventures among the Insects and Strange Adventures among the Birds.

  CHAPTER 22

  Bigger fish to fry

  Team building, and the endgame

  BY NOW JLB Smith’s international reputation was secure, following the discovery and description of the first two coelacanths, the publication of his book, Sea Fishes of Southern Africa, as well as numerous scientific papers, and the phenomenal success of Old Fourlegs. He received many invitations to attend meetings and conferences abroad, but accepted few of them. In April 1958, at the age 60 years, he attended the first international conference on sharks in New Orleans, where methods for repelling sharks were discussed. It was his first and last visit to the USA. At this conference he met many leading American ichthyologists, including Carl Hubbs. He found himself in great demand. For instance, he was invited by the US Navy to undertake a lecture tour of some of their facilities, but was unable to accept this invitation as he had a standing engagement to meet with Dr António de Oliveira Salazar, Prime Minister of Portugal, in Portugal. He had first met the Prime Minister in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) during one of the early Mozambique expeditions. They renewed their acquaintance and appeared on Portuguese television together.

  In July 1959 JLB Smith embarked on one of his few trips to Europe, visiting museums in Germany, France, Holland, Denmark and Britain to examine the type specimens of fishes from the Western Indian Ocean and meeting scientists with whom he had corresponded. He was also able to help many European ichthyologists with difficult taxonomic problems.

  From 1960 onwards JLB Smith did not leave South Africa again and focused his energy on producing publications. In 1963 he and Margaret published Fishes of the Seychelles, and in 1965 they jointly authored Fishes of the Tsitsikama Coastal National Park, on the fish fauna of Africa’s first marine reserve, in both English and Afrikaans editions. For this title, Margaret prepared a further 233 colour paintings of fishes1. The Tsitsikamma books covered 189 marine fish species and three freshwater fishes (longfin eel, smallscale redfin and Cape kurper).

  JLB commented on the origin of this book in a letter to Dave Bickell dated 19th May 1967:

  ‘The start of this book goes back quite a long way. For many years we have been asked by Booksellers, Anglers and naturalists who find the “Sea Fishes” too heavy to carry around, if we would not consider the publication of a more convenient type of handbook covering the common fishes that most people are likely to see. We always hoped to be able to do this and when the National Parks Board approached us two years ago we saw in this the opportunity for achieving two aims in one book (we [don’t] kill birds with stones). There is a lot [that] lies behind this book. We were determined that it should be one of the finest of its kind and have put an enormous amount of work into the illustrations. We determined from the start that these were not going to be the ordinary flat drawings which while very useful for identification are usually mere travesties of the real creatures.’

  Margaret’s colour illustrations of fishes, all of which were newly rendered from fresh specimens, probably reached their apogee in these books. She used monochrome photographs to record the shape, fins and scalation of the fishes and then tinted the photographs in colour. Another innovative technique that she used to improve the accuracy of her paintings was to copy the scale patterns of fishes on a photocopying machine!

  In 1966 and 1967, possibly in anticipation of his impending demise, JLB Smith wrote two popular books on fishes, Our Fishes (published as Ons Visse in Afrikaans) and High Tide (Smith, 1968a, b). The chapters in Our Fishes were adapted from a series of radio talks given by Smith on the Afrikaans service of the SABC in 1962, part of a series entitled Uit die Natuur (Out of Nature); whereas High Tide is a collection of popular articles that he had previously had published in magazines in which he describes his adventures collecting fishes along the East African coast, some of which are also mentioned in this book.

  In Our Fishes Smith shares his remarkable knowledge of fishes and fishing, gained not only as a scientist and angler but also as an inquisitive beachcomber who gleaned information and anecdotes from hundreds of people along the coasts of South and East Africa, and as an active correspondent with fish researchers and anglers worldwide. He discusses dangerous and poisonous fishes, the behaviour, diet, habitat preferences and distribution of many angling species (galjoen, tunny, marlin, stumpnose, steenbras, elf, leervis, musselcracker, dageraad, slinger, dassie, zebra, kabeljou and spotted grunter) as well as unusual fishes, like the coelacanth, klipvis, suckerfishes, eels, seahorses, pipefishes and pipe-horses. His writing style is conversational and highly accessible, and he shares his knowledge without being preachy.

  For instance, Smith has this to say about electricity generation in fishes: ‘From the study of fossils scientists are confident that even fishes of hundreds of millions [of] years ago had organs that could produce electricity. After all, electricity was always there; man merely discovered it and how to use it; he did not create it.’ Regarding the klipvis, he reveals that they are live-bearers, like some sharks, marine catfish and the coelacanth. While discussing the remarkable ability of suckerfishes to cling tightly to rocks in the intertidal zone, he remarks, ‘Science is a part of nature. Man is not the only one to use scientific methods or processes to his advantage; many other creatures do this and many did so long before men and his kind appeared on earth’ (Smith, 1968a).

  He also relates how Somalis use remoras (suckerfish) to catch turtles:

  ‘They catch and keep a stock of live remoras and put a ring round the base of the tail. These they take out in a boat to the reefs where turtles are found. When a turtle is spotted they fasten a line to the ring on the remora and let it pursue the turtle and attach itself to the smooth underside of this animal. … The turtle is then drawn to the
boat with a line’ (Smith, 1968a).

  Using remoras to catch turtles has also been recorded in Madagascar.

  With regard to the seahorse, Smith (1968a) writes:

  ‘Quite often those who see a specimen of the seahorse for the first time exclaim and say that they had thought it was a mythical creature and not a real animal. … the breeding habits of the seahorse are also upside down and among the queerest in the fish world, if not in nature. It is the female that produces eggs, that at least is normal; but after that normality ends. When the eggs are ripe and ready to be shed the female seeks a responsive male. … When the female finds her male, the two embrace when … the female pushes her eggs into the pouch of the male, where they are fertilised. … A large male may take over six hundred eggs. In most animals it is the female that cares for the young, but the seahorse is way ahead in the matter of the emancipation of the female.’

  Smith encourages readers to carry out experiments (as he often did) to learn more about fishes. ‘The body of this tiny fish [rocksucker] is semi-transparent. In good light with a lens one can see the heart and chief blood-vessels. You can actually see the heart beating. I have counted the beats and found the average to be about 48 per minute.’ He also describes unusual angling incidents, for instance, when he caught a leervis that had swallowed a stumpnose he had used as live-bait, and landed the leervis without having hooked it. In a discussion on whether fish feel pain, he mentions the case of a shark that was caught, gutted and then thrown overboard. Its guts were then used as bait and the same shark was re-caught (Smith, 1968a)!

  He also laments the poor use that we make of our marine resources:

  ‘With our great wealth of wonderful eating fish, at the lowest prices in the civilised world, we South Africans are spoilt. We make poor use of it. We eat only about 10 lbs. of fish per head per annum, barely ten per cent of the fish we catch. … As a nation we are stupid about fish. First class fish has twice or more the food value of meat. Fish protein is the healthiest and best for us all.’

  Later he comments on the palatability of rays, which are regarded as a delicacy elsewhere: ‘We are all too well off; in the matter of eating fish we South Africans are too fussy’, although he also admits to not having been able to eat a slimy hagfish, a species that is enjoyed by some. In terms of taste, he rates his favourite fish as red steenbras, elf and spotted grunter, and also describes how to make innovative and tasty fish dishes, such as ‘dassie biltong’ and ‘geelbek toutjies’ (salted and dried fish fingers, respectively) (Smith, 1968a).

  Smith also describes some bizarre incidents at sea that he himself experienced, or that were told to him by others, including attacks by marlin on fishermen in canoes, and attacks on boats by normally docile manta rays and even by plankton-eating whale sharks. He mentions that an ‘innocent’ whale shark was once found to have ‘a number of shoes, leggings and leather belts’ in its stomach, and also suggests that giant red steenbras ate some of the passengers from the wreck of the Birkenhead in 1852 (Smith, 1968b).

  He inevitably also expresses an opinion on the existence or otherwise of ‘sea monsters’:

  ‘Some are now not so sure that these are just “tales” for in recent times marine scientists have found a “Leptocephalus”2 six feet long. … most known eels grow to about ten times the length of their baby “Leptocephalus”. This indicates a length of at least sixty feet for the adult of this monster baby’ (Smith, 1968b).

  Smith (1968a) also remarks that ‘From a great deal of evidence I have come to believe that some people exude substances [now known as pheromones] whose smell and taste attract sharks and that consequently those people will always be in danger from sharks’. He also expresses the opinion in Our Fishes, highly controversial today, that the only way to deal with the ‘shark menace’ is to fish them to local extinction! ‘I have long been convinced that extermination is the only sound method to combat and eliminate the shark menace’ (Smith, 1968a). He repeats this advice in High Tide: ‘Instead of meekly accepting the shark as master of the sea, scientific research should be directed to his complete elimination as a danger, based on the principle of at least local extermination. If enough are killed, the rest will get away and keep away’ (Smith, 1968b).

  Needless to say, many modern scientists, the author included, do not agree with this point of view, as sharks have an important ecological role to play. Smith not only occasionally showed poor judgement, he occasionally got his facts wrong. For instance, he stated that the yellow-bellied sea-snake, Hydrophis platurus, that occurs off southern African shores, lays its eggs on land. This species is a live-bearer and gives birth at sea (FitzSimons, 1962).

  Curtis (2015) says of Our Fishes, ‘The stories in it are of great interest – history and marine biology seamlessly woven together by a rare writer – a scientist who could make himself perfectly understood by the man in the street’. In his book Smith describes some of his most memorable catches. In the early 1930s he landed a huge dageraad off the Tsitsikamma coast:

  ‘As it lay dying on the rock at my feet it glowed with a series of shimmering colours that held me spellbound. Waves of pink, red, blue, bronze and gold all mixed up passed over that body one after the other. After 40 years that fish remains one of my most vivid memories of the wonderful life of the sea. … I could not bring myself to mutilate this beautiful creature, but carried it up the 800 ft. cliff and finally to the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. Mounted, it remained on show there until part of the Museum burnt down in 1941’ (Smith, 1968a).

  The Tsitsikamma coast was one of his favourite fishing spots, as he explains:

  ‘The very deep water at the shore means that the angler can expect to catch not only the usual run of fishes, but that he may constantly hope to encounter the more elusive, rather deep water denizens such as the fabulous Red Steenbras and the Yellowtail. … The provident angler should in this part always carry a camera, for he never knows when he may make the catch of his life’ (Smith, 1966).

  Even though he himself was not a diver, Smith regularly interviewed snorkel and scuba divers and discovered that many fish (such as kraaibek) that were thought to be rare because they do not readily take an angler’s bait or become snared in nets or traps, are, in fact, quite common underwater. Throughout Our Fishes he identifies gaps in our knowledge and encourages readers to fill them.

  Shirley Bell wrote to Margaret after JLB’s death:

  ‘The way he was towards thousands of ordinary people who admired him so deeply because he always remembered he was a human being first and a brilliant scientist afterwards. That is why his articles were so tremendously popular. He enjoyed sharing what he knew and he discovered, and readers loved this. So many scientists seem to feel that their knowledge is a secret thing not to be shared with laymen – but the Professor wasn’t like that’ (SAIAB archives).

  In his notes on ‘The Sea Fishes of Southern Africa Book Fund’ in the introduction to the 1949 edition of The Sea Fishes of Southern Africa, Bransby Key stated, ‘It is intended to perpetuate this fund … and it is hoped to be able to assist the production of a companion volume on the Freshwater Fishes of Southern Africa’. JLB Smith mentions in his correspondence in the 1950s that he intends compiling a book on southern African freshwater fishes, and Margaret stated in 1987, with reference to the 1949 Sea Fishes book, ‘At the completion of the book we had come to the crossroads. It seemed obvious that we should write the companion volume, on the freshwater fishes of southern Africa. On the other hand for 3 years we had steeped ourselves in marine fishes and it seemed a pity not to use that expertise. … So the decision was made: no freshwater fish’ (MM Smith, 1987).

  The CSIR and Rhodes University encouraged Smith, as he approached retirement, to build up a team of ichthyologists to expand capacity and continue his work. Several ichthyologists came and went, including Peter Castle; but one, Rex Jubb, stayed for a considerable period of time and made a lasting impact. Reginald (‘Rex’) Arthur Jubb was born in Britstown, Eastern Cape
, in 1905 and educated at Rhodes University, where JLB Smith was his lecturer in chemistry. While at Rhodes, Rex learned about Smith’s ‘fishy’ interests; and after he joined the Rhodesian Civil Service as a meteorologist in 1927, they corresponded, with Jubb sending Smith fish collections.

  Rex Jubb with a tigerfish.

  From 1952, Jubb published a series of articles on freshwater fishes, including papers on freshwater eels (Anguilla species), which were considered to have commercial potential. Jubb retired in 1955 and in 1956, aged 51 years, he was appointed as a Research Assistant in the Department of Ichthyology at Rhodes University. In February 1957 Rex and his wife Hilda joined the Smiths in the department; but, in 1961, space problems necessitated moving their freshwater fish specimen and publication collections, and themselves, to the Albany Museum where Rex worked in a voluntary capacity, although he did serve briefly as Acting Director in 1964/1965. He continued to work at the Albany Museum until the mid-1970s and remained an active correspondent from his home in Port Alfred thereafter.

  JLB and Margaret Smith with Rex and Hilda Jubb in 1956.

  Jubb’s collection of freshwater fishes formed the foundation for the development of the Albany Museum’s freshwater fish collection which, combined with the collections from the Iziko South African Museum (dating back to 1875) and the Natal Museum (to 1905), which were later added, eventually comprised over 250,000 specimens. The Albany Museum collection was eventually amalgamated with the National Fish Collection at SAIAB in 2015.