by John Hersey
S: Please.
F: I have to tell you first about a shocking tragedy. Out at the tip of a long finger of dune reaching up around a quiet bay from the bluffs of Highlands, New Jersey, there existed for many years one of the most beautiful facilities in the world for the study of fish life. In an old building, one of many remnants of a World War One army post known as Fort Hancock, a large holding tank was built by what was then called the Sandy Hook Marine Laboratory—later renamed the Northeast Fisheries Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The elliptical tank was thirty-five feet long, fifteen feet wide, and ten feet deep, and it held thirty-two thousand gallons of filtered seawater. In the room there were almost perfect controls of environmental conditions—of temperature, light, and sound—so that fish could experience day and night and seasonal changes almost as if they were in the wild. There were windows around the sides of the tank, to watch the fish through. In that tank for two decades marine biologists and animal behaviorists conducted hundreds of exquisite experiments, mostly on bluefish. Indeed, much of what we human beings know as dependable fact about our fellow animal the bluefish was observed in that body of water.
On the windy night of infamy of September 21, 1985, an arsonist set fire to the laboratory.
S: Oh my God.
F: Did I say, Stranger, the first day we went out, that you might think Pomatomus saltatrix vicious? When I heard of the fire, I wondered what vile excuse for the species Homo sapiens could have done such a thing?—a numskull kid who’d watched too much celebration of arson on TV, an insane disgruntled former employee, a loony fish hater, a flame-loving sicko? I had read, always with a thrilling sense of discovery, scores of studies done in that building. The news of the fire literally made me feel ill; it seemed an affront to everything I value in humanity—was just as bad as a wanton act of terrorism or a racist atrocity.
S: Oh, I agree.
F: Anyway. A fire company had to drive all the way out the Hook to get to the building, and by the time the engines arrived the wind-fed flames had totally demolished the lab. Everything—except the mocking shell of the tank—was lost. Almost all the data of all the years, priceless treasures of loving study, were destroyed. An idiot had burned knowledge.
A pathetic madman, as it turned out. Eight months later a ranger in the adjacent Gateway National Recreation Area—a man who had been assigned as a firefighter in the park’s firehouse, and who had fought forest fires in Idaho—confessed to eight separate sins of arson, including the one that destroyed the fisheries lab. Having told his story, he shot himself dead with a forest ranger’s handgun.
When the staff of the lab got over their shock, in the days after the lab burned, they raked through the ashes and retrieved what they could. One precious thing that somehow survived was a short film of blues feeding in the tank, and one of the Sandy Hook scientists made a copy of it for me and gave it to me as a present. And one day last winter, using the projector in the lecture room of the Key West public library, I watched it.
After all the years of fishing for blues and trying to visualize what must have been happening under the surface—under the mirror of the sky that you were complaining about last time—I was finally able, sitting there in a house of books, to go into the water with six blues, to enter right into their medium and swim with them.
At first we were in the murk of breaking dawn. The fish schooled, paddling gently and coasting. They went their rounds. It grew lighter. The pace quickened. Then the blues began to hunt. The school broke; each was on its own. The great forked tails drove the fish faster and faster; you could see the huge engines of their flank muscles working. The fish were crafted from flexible steel, the countershading under the light from a neon sky making them appear one solid submarine color not much different from that of the water—save for a bright spot, appearing luminescent, or like a porthole lit from within, at the forward base of the pectoral fin on each side, in back of the gills. Was this spot a mark of recognition of its kind each could make out from a distance in the shadows of their world?
For a time the film stalled into slow motion. As each blue drifted past me, the hostile near eye—which you remember, Stranger, I had distinctly not wanted to face under water—pivoted buttonlike to focus on me, its curiosity laced with a fierce territorial strictness; then, as the fish surprised and relieved me by negligently sailing along, the button swung to a more forward beam. It had not been quite as bad as I had feared; this was hunger time; I would not be good to eat, or even worth judging. One fish opened its mouth and moved its tongue, as if trying to test whether there were any spoor of baitfish—or perhaps bad taste of human beings—around.
The film broke back to full speed, and the blues, on the alert, were whizzing past me like shooting stars in an August sky. Suddenly the smooth bright lid of our universe was broken in several places, and a handful of mummichogs, robust and chubby four- and five-inch light brown fish with dark bars along their flanks, tossed from above, swam downward from the surface. Not far. Up from below, like rockets, their powerful tails driving so hard as to seem to flutter, the great bodies flashed. They were going so fast that they had to open their mouths two or three feet before they reached the bait—and how those saw-edged caverns gaped! Then the doom chop of razor teeth and a sudden sharp swerve to right or left, and a spurt downward to be ready at once to kill again. More mummichogs. All around me there was an appalling energy of devastating missiles, almost always shooting upward to keep the targets framed against the morning light. Sometimes the charging silver-gray parcels broke the shining surface overhead and then cut away downward, leaving a wobbling and bubbling ring of turmoil up there. Soon there began to be what looked like a snowfall of neglected bits of bait, chopped away from what had been gulped, drifting toward the bottom. Other gobbets, floating, speckled the surface.
It was all happening so fast—far faster than I can tell it to you—that it took me awhile, with the help of some slow-motion footage, to notice two apparently important things. One was that as the fish charged the bait, their eyes swiveled far forward, so that even though the bright buttons were fastened to the sides of their heads, they appeared able to afford the fish direct forward binocular vision: vision, that is, with depth perception. So apparently sight—speed of eyes—was vital. There was one incident when two blues saw the same mummichog at what seemed the same moment and rose in beautiful parallel entrechats; but one’s eyes must have been a millisecond faster than the other’s, and it got to the food first, breaking away to the right as the other, beaten, broke away just as fast to the left in order not to be beaten again. The other thing I saw was mysterious to me—and remains so, I gather, to the scientists: As the fish fed, they kept flashing their twin pelvic fins. Most of the time, while swimming, they kept these two fins, located on either side underneath their bodies at the forward end of their bellies, tucked up tight. But on the charge, while feeding, they kept dropping them to their full extension, like sailboat hulls letting down double centerboards. But very fast. The word for this action had to be “flashing,” because the transparent fins peculiarly picked up the dawn light, much more than any other feature of their bodies, and shone like hurtling bright signal flags.
Gradually, as the fountain play of ravenous flesh progressed, and as satiety—the faintest possibility of which had so recently seemed quite out of the question—actually began to set in, the upward surges continued but seemed to lose, bit by bit, their murderous urgency. The semaphore signals of the flags, whatever their code, were less frantic. The huge propellant tails eased their drive. Not that a single mummichog swam free of its fate; there always seemed to be room in some gullet for just one more. But the ceremony was working itself out.
Finally the morning repast was over. The fish slowed their pace to normal cruising speed. Having competed with each other like Greek athletes, to the utmost limits of their resources, they now shaped up and went back to
school. I must say, though, that at this point they looked more like professors than scholars, with their distended paunches, and their calm collegial air, and their look of having known all along that things would be this way.
S: How wonderful! Thank you. That makes me feel as if my eyes have finally penetrated the surface, and I can visualize what happens when we get a strike.
F: But with a difference: That scene must have been what its like when the blues swarm to the surface, attacking a big cloud of bait. Our fishing here, most days, is a matter of persuading one or two of a small school to come up for supper—our supper. I’m hoping, though, that one day I’ll be able to treat you to a swarm. I come on a huge school working the surface two or three times a summer here.
S: I certainly don’t want to identify with baitfish, but since I’ve been coming out fishing with you—and just now when you were talking about feeling as if you were in the tank during the slaughter of the mummichogs—I keep having this image of the fisherman being caught by the fish, instead of the other way around.
F: Yes, you teased me with that fantasy the other day. Could it have to do with the ticking of clocks out here? “The Lord God hath sworn by his holiness, that, lo, the days shall come upon you, that he will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fishhooks”?
S: Maybe that’s it. In bed the other night I kept thinking, as if I were having a bad dream, about the passage from the Odyssey when Odysseus sailed past Scylla and Charybdis. I love Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, and I’ve read it several times. Scylla plucks a half dozen of Odysseus’s best men from the ship, and Homer gives a vivid picture of their being ripped like fish “from the surface/to dangle wriggling through the air.”
F: I try to remind myself, each time I lift a fish out of the water, and see it struggling that way on the line, that there’s a sufficient reason for my taking its life: the harmony of the chains of existence.
S: That’s fine, because you consider yourself the top link in the chain. Mightn’t it be that some other creatures—viruses, let’s say, or the worms of the graveyard—are links above us, or beyond us, in the chain?
F: You’re right, Stranger. We, too, will be played on the end of a line, sooner or later.
S: I hope I’ll have as much courage as a bluefish, then.
F: I plan to make some runs and jumps. I’d like to have learned from these blues.
S: I hope I’m learning from you how to learn from them. One thing I’ve been finding out on these trips is that it’s not easy to shake my anthropocentric past. I realize that my landsman’s habits of thinking—mostly about my relationships with human animals—may have been blinding me, as much as the mirroring surface of the sea has been, to the unfamiliar life beneath it. It all comes down to wanting to see—to penetrate the mirror and not just see one’s self and one’s own world….
One thing I do see is that you’re moving out on the shoal.
F: There aren’t birds around this end. Keep your eye out for terns: They’re our best guides at this time of year. I think I’ll put a lead sinker on one of the lines, try deep trolling—with the blue lure.
S: You have blue and yellow on the lines. Can the fish tell the difference—beyond just light and dark?
F: They can. Most mammals can’t see colors. The bull being angered by red is a myth. The few beasts Nature has chosen to endow with color vision make a club of odd characters: us and other primates, turtles, lizards, insects, birds, and the bony fishes. Black-and-white for all the others on Noah’s ask. Some fishes can see colors we can’t. A researcher at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory discovered that the Japanese dace, Tribolodon hakonensis, called ugni by the Japanese, can see ultraviolet rays, way at the bottom of the shortwave range. What’s more, taking color pictures of the fish with an ultraviolet filter, he revealed two stripes down the fish’s belly that we human beings can’t see—stripes that may help the fish to recognize its own brothers and sisters. Fish give each other signals by changes of color on their bodies. You remember I pointed out the inflamed spot behind the blue’s pectoral fin the other day? By that bright blush she was giving a message to male blues.
S: I’ll never get over the stare the blue gave us that we caught the first day we went out, and I was fascinated, when you were telling just now about that film, by what you said about the eyes—their importance in feeding, and the way they could swivel around.
F: Blues’ vision is different from ours in ways it’s hard even to imagine. First of all there are structural differences in the eye itself. The basic elements are the same: cornea, iris, lens, retina. But the iris of the fish doesn’t open and close like ours to let in more or less light; and whereas our lens is oval in section and focuses by being made thicker or thinner by special muscles, the fish lens is and stays spherical, and focus is achieved by a set of a different sort of muscles moving the lens back and forth, here and there, within the eye.
The biggest difference, of course, and to us the eeriest one, is that the eyes are on the sides of the fish’s head, so it can see almost all around. Like having eyes where our ears are. You must have gotten the creeps, as I have, seeing pictures taken with what photographers call a fisheye camera lens; it puts you within a kind of globe of vision. Each bluefish eye is independent of the other—can wobble about to look in one direction on one side and quite another on the other. I get woozy talking about it. The two eyes can, though, work together for forward vision. There are a couple of blind spots—dead astern, and, like ours in a car for the few feet of road in front of the hood, for a short distance in front of the nose.
Blues have no eyelids, so can’t blink; and of course they have no need to shed tears, since the salt sea washes woes away, as well as motes and beams. There are wonders in fish eyes. Sometimes I fish on the bottom out here for fluke and flounder. When these are juveniles, they swim around upright like any other fish, with an eye on each side; but later they lie down for the rest of their lives, on one side on the bottom, and one eye gradually moves right up through to what is then the top of the head, so they wind up with two eyes on one side—Picasso fish, I call them. Then there’s the four-eyed fish, Anableps anableps, which glides about on the surface, with one pair of eyes under water and one above, looking for food in both air and sea. The oceanic spookfish—really!—has eyes on top of barrel-like cylinders and can only see upward. The stargazer, of the family Uranoscopidae, is a toadlike horror that buries itself in the mud, with only its eyes and mouth showing; a wormlike thing dancing out of the mouth lures little fishes, and when they come close, electric organs derived from the stargazer’s optic nerve shock them into insensibility with fifty volts, and down the mouth they go.
S: “If looks could kill…”
F: On a clear day we can see through air for miles; in this plankton-busy water blues probably can’t see more than forty or fifty feet. But within limits their vision is very keen. The people at Sandy Hook thought that blues may be able to see lures cast through the air before they hit the water; at the tank they would throw fish to the far end, and the blues would follow them at tremendous speed and grab them as they landed. And stream fishermen know that a trout seems to be able to distinguish ahead of time one sort of tiny arriving fly, which it will want, from another, which it won’t.
The blue’s eyes are on the lookout not only for prey, of course, but also for predators. There’s that dangerous blind spot to the rear—the lateral line may help some there.
S: What fish do eat blues?
F: Their sprint speed in swimming makes blues safe from all but the swiftest big fishes—sharks, tunas, swordfish, wahoo. None of those wallhangers venture into the Sound, so all the blues have to fear here is me and thee.
S: Who seem not to be doing so well today.
F: Alas. And we’re already way out here off the Tashmoo opening.
I tell you
what: Bring the lines in, and I’ll try something. I’ll spray some of this fish attractant on a Hoochie, and see if it helps. It leaves a trail of odor in the water.
S: Does it work? Can fish smell under water?
F: I bought this stuff a while ago to try it. Frankly, I suspect it was designed for freshwater fishing; it doesn’t seem to help much out here, but today’s a day to try anything.
All right, let your line out.
Yes, fishes certainly can smell under water—smell and taste. They have pairs of small holes on both sides of the head, above and forward of the eyes; and water constantly flushes through the forward holes and out the rear ones, passing over sensors that pick up odors. As for taste, fishes have taste buds in other places besides on the tongue. The whiting has them on its fins. You probably wouldn’t think of the catfish as a gourmet, but it has taste buds on its lips, its fins, its feelerlike whiskers, and even on the skin of its body. Blues, who chop and gobble, probably don’t count so much on taste as some other fishes do.
Yet I’ve seen blues caught by a technique of fishing called chumming: You drop dollops of a slush of moistened, chopped-up bait as you drift along; the fish pick up the smell and taste of the trail and come up to your bait on the line. In fact, fishermen long ago learned that certain odors on lures attract fish, and others repel them. Chum may be made from chopped-up fish guts; oil from menhaden and herring definitely helps. For centuries freshwater anglers have used squashed worms, maggots, bloodsuckers, crayfish, and so on, to enliven the scent of their bait. Cheese and human saliva seem to attract some fish—though I don’t think it was my granddaughter Sierra’s spit that caught us the fish that day, just luck.
S: What are the bad smells?
F: Some fishermen just can’t figure out why they have no luck while others around them are catching like mad. They’re people who, before they go out each time, pour gas in their outboards and get their hands fouled with motor oil, and then handle their lures. If I may ichthyomorphize again, people who’ve stopped smoking are like fish: They tend to want to keep away from the smell of nicotine. Suntan lotion, scented soaps, insect repellents—bad stuff on your lures. In fact, fish don’t like the smell of the oil from human skin, and some of the best fishermen rub chum or fish slime on their hands before baiting up. As I’m sure you know, one of the wonders of the sea is that salmon are drawn by scent and taste back to their natal rivers. Researchers working with them have found that they won’t climb fish ladders that have had bear paws—or human hands—rinsed in the water running down the ladders, though tomato juice and human urine don’t bother them…