The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  And we are not the only creatures who think so. One May evening, fishing in waders far out in the river, I reeled in a roe shad. A stringer was dangling from a D-ring on my vest—a long set of sliding brass meat hooks designed, like oversized safety pins, to go in past the gills, come out through the mouth, and fasten. I put the shad on the stringer. It was a noisy, awkward, not to say absurd arrangement, but the current was heavy and I was too lazy to wade ashore. I caught another roe shad and hung her on the keeper, too. Now I had nearly ten pounds of living shad swimming in place right next to me while I kept on casting. I quit before long, and dragged the fish to the riverbank. As I routinely do, I hit them with a priest before opening them up. My priest is a Louisville Slugger fourteen inches long, a miniature baseball bat made by the Hillerich & Bradsby company and player-personalized “Alosa sapidissima.” Priests of various weights and configurations are sold in sport shops that cater to meat fishermen. Sam Flick, a teacher of fly casting and a sales representative in the headquarters store at L. L. Bean, told me several years ago that he was one of a small minority in the fishing department who thought that Bean’s should sell priests. Considering what else they sell, why not? On more recent visits I have noticed on the walls an arsenal of crankbaits, each with two treble hooks, and among them a container for worms.

  I took a roe shad off the stringer, turned it onto its back, and opened its cavity with the German scissors. Nothing was inside. The fish had no intestines, no roe sacs. The inside of the cavity was completely empty, the walls without blemish. For some moments I thought I was dreaming. There were no ruptures of any kind in the scales and sides. What had happened? I looked into the mouth. The back of the throat was much torn up. Suddenly, a picture formed, and as it did I think I might have cried out—a picture of an eel going into the shad on the stringer. Had I looked down while fishing, I would have seen at least two feet of the eel protruding from the mouth of the live fish while the eel’s head was inside the cavity eating the roe and intestines and licking the plate clean. I didn’t see that happen. I probably would have slipped a disk if I had. The roe in the other fish was o.k. I ate it under bacon for dinner.

  Two weeks later at five in the morning I was fishing from my canoe in an enveloping mist. The stringer was over the side. I was catching bucks and roes. Seven feet of water was below the hull. Again, an eel went in through the mouth of a roe shad on the keeper and ate her insides clean. Never again. I made two phone calls. In Cabela’s catalogue I found a wire basket that hangs in the water like a birdcage, and I called 1-800. I also called the shad biologist Richard St. Pierre, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who told me that I was reporting something he had neither seen nor heard of. A few years later, when I asked Boyd Kynard about shads’ interactions with other species in the rivers, he said, “The only relationship I’ve seen is when shad die eels are right in the body cavity. They feed on the carcasses a lot. We pull up gill nets and a dead shad is there, and—it’s awesome—an eel is in the shad and comes crawling out.”

  Eels being catadromous, and shad anadromous, they share rivers, and both are exceptional very-long-distance swimmers. Willy reminds me that the shad’s loose scales allow it to swim more like an eel than most other fish: “Shad scales are thin and deciduous because of the amount of lateral undulation. Shad have such a flexible body it needs a scale that will move with it, not armor plate. Eels and other eel-like fishes have independently lost their scales, or have reduced their scales a lot. In other words, eels have no scales and are correspondingly flexible.” Willy thinks the deciduous scale has an evolutionary future about as promising as a saber tooth. “Deciduous scales—they’re sort of on the way out.”

  An ocean sunfish has fifteen vertebrae and is stiffer than a clipboard. An eel has roughly a hundred and twenty vertebrae. “One way to get an idea about the body flexibility of a fish is to count the vertebrae,” Willy continues. “A brook trout has about forty.” Exposing the vertebrae of a shad in the lab, he counts fifty-five. “These are fish that have a lot of mobility, and when you catch one they don’t just pull steadily. You feel ’em swimming.”

  I ask Willy, “How do you skin an eel?”

  From a back room, Willy’s colleague Al Richmond, a herpetologist, calls out, “Same way you skin a snake.”

  Willy goes on with his dissecting, adding nothing to Richmond’s instructions, obviously considering them complete.

  The adult eel has among its predators snapping turtles, otters, minks, and me. Actually, you don’t have to know how to skin a snake if you want to eat an eel. You can cut it into three-inch segments and saute them in butter. I baited a shad dart with a shad’s stomach one evening when some eels were hanging around while I was processing fish. As I dangled the stomach in the shallow water, an eel grabbed it, pulled it under a rock, and chewed through the line. Next time, I used a wire leader and a plain hook. Eel is sapidissima— a firm, most savory fish. When the segments are sizzling in the hot butter, the skin turns blue.

  A mature, green shad—a hard, female shad whose full sacs have not yet ripened into spawning—may be carrying as many as six hundred thousand eggs, but this would not impress an ocean sunfish (Mola mola), whose sacs contain three hundred million eggs. An Atlantic salmon might look twice. A hen salmon carries about eight hundred eggs per pound of body weight. A roe shad, per pound of body weight, is carrying at least sixty thousand. A twelve-pound shad commercially caught in the Hudson River some years ago had four and a half pounds of roe inside her. That would approximate a million eggs.

  Roe sacs are variegated—yellow, orange, speckled white-and-red. Most are rich burgundy. Some commercial shad fishers cut across the gill isthmus and bleed their fish, believing that this might “improve” the roe sacs, toning them up from red toward a more negotiable orange. If it comes out orange, though, it was orange in the first place. The colors derive from the content of the zooplankton the shad were eating in the ocean. Various carotenoids produce the reds and the yellows.

  Before shad roe achieved its belated status as a delicacy of the table, it was used for little more than fish bait, a fact that raises an obvious question: How could those myriad eggs cohere on a fishhook? “Frank Forester’s Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America” (1849) provides an answer in a discussion of “roe-bait for bass.” You prepare it in the same way that you would prepare salmon roe. “Paste composed of roe … taken out when freshly killed, washed carefully, and cleansed of all the impurities, the blood and filamentous matter, thoroughly dried in the air, salted with two ounces of rock-salt, and a quarter of an ounce of saltpetre to a pound of spawn, dried gently before a slow fire, or in an oven at a low heat, and then potted down and covered with melted lard or suet in earthen pots, is a most murderous bait … Within a few weeks old, it will cut out of the pots like stiff cheese, and will adhere readily to the hook.” In “The American Angler’s Book” (1864), Uncle Thad Norris describes what happens when “the Shad-roe Fisherman” baits a hook with shad roe and lowers it into a river. “Each ova as it is washed from the baited hook and floats off down the tide, is greedily swallowed by any fish … and he is toled along until he finds the ‘placer,’ when the ‘nugget’ is swallowed at a gulph.” Among the numerous guesses in response to the mystery of why shad strike at anything, one involving roe was presented not long ago in Fly Fishing Quarterly by Robert Elman, who said that shad “will attack a fly—perhaps prompted by predatory instinct, but more likely in aggression toward any small fish or other creature that might be an egg-eater.”

  Under a microscope in the lab in Amherst, Willy looks at a roe sac, addresses it with running commentary, and steps aside once in a while so I can peer at what he is talking about. “Look at that amazing vasculature—a superb dendritic system, all those tributaries and rivers getting maximal blood to the eggs so they can develop. They’re quite pretty as well. They come down from the dorsal aorta and through the mesenteries into the roe sac. The eggs have to c
ontain everything that the creature is going to be, so they are accumulating proteins, they’re accumulating nucleic acids—RNA transcripts of the DNA, so that when the embryo starts to develop it will be ready to start making new proteins for itself. They also accumulate fats, which are a good storage form of energy, and are one of the reasons they’re such a rich and delicious food. As well, these egg cells are packed with the organelles—the individual structural components of the cell—which allow rapid cell division to occur, once the egg is fertilized. Each one of these cells has millions upon millions of components packaged together in a very highly structured way. One of the many functions of the liver—which is often referred to as a master organ, in terms of its ability to do all kinds of different functions—is to produce the yolk proteins that are going to wind up in the egg cells. They’re synthesizing that material in the liver, and then it’s being circulated by the circulatory system to the ovary, where it is released by the circulatory system and incorporated inside the egg cells. That process—putting yolk inside the individual egg cells—is called vitellogenesis. A tremendous amount of energy is involved.”

  Willy is married to Betty McGuire, who teaches introductory biology, human biology, and animal behavior eight miles away at Smith College. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on voles, and is an authority on their behavioral ecology. She has cross-fostered voles, causing one species to rear the pups of another species, later studying the manner in which the cross-fostered pups rear their own litters. Her insights have not been irrelevant to the rearing of human children, including Kate and Owen—her own and Willy’s. Came a recent spring when Betty saved a rat from certain death in Northampton. It was a grade-school, schoolroom rat, and its summer vacation was about to be spent in a dumpster. Betty took the rat home to Kate, Owen, and Willy. After it had lived with them awhile, it developed an illness. She took the rat to a vet. The bill was seventy dollars. The rat had to return for a checkup. The family has five cats. The cats have had dental work. The cats have had tartar removed from their teeth. The cats have had teeth pulled. The cost of all this thins Willy.

  Owen, Kate, Betty, and Willy have a twenty-foot forty-horse Godfrey Marine Sweetwater—a living room on pontoons—in which they cruise the Holyoke Pool. Now and again, Willy and I have used it as a fly-fishing platform, casting for bass and fallfish, he with his historic glass rod. Sometimes, he has a pole seine aboard, and a top-of-the-line Bausch & Lomb microscope, which he will use not only to examine small components of aquatic life but also to assist him in tying flies to his tippets, in the way that fishermen less richly equipped use magnifying lenses cantilevered from their hats. Fallfish rise in the evening and sip at the surface like trout. You follow the breaking circles, the successive rings of the rises, and try to lay your fly on the next one as it appears. Willy lands on the next one with a No. 14 Cahill. A fallfish is a minnow, not the sort of thing that galvanizes Trout Unlimited. Some minnows are larger than others, however. There are minnows four feet long. They live in Colorado, among other places, and are known as squawfish, but the American Fisheries Society calls them pikeminnows. They eat other fish and have teeth in their throats. The largest minnow Willy has ever seen is the fallfish—swirl, pow!—that hits his floating Cahill. He measures it in inches—11.5. Semotilus corporalis, it too is piscivorous. “There aren’t too many minnows that specialize in eating other fish,” he says. “Look at that terminal mouth, the long gape. It’s a mouth set up for eating fish.”

  One morning, Willy skippered the pontoon boat into the Northampton oxbow, got out in shallow water, and opened the pole seine. It was something like a badminton net, a pole at each end. I moved one, he the other. Grad students in his field keep pole seines in or on their cars, and pull off the road wherever they see water. The Northampton oxbow is a cutoff meander in the Connecticut River that has been further occluded by Interstate 91, like a bar sinister traversing the letter C. The resulting lagoon is, in Willy’s words, “a tremendous nursery ground for fish.” Starting waist-deep, we hauled ashore twenty-five feet of net. It contained banded killifish, yellow perch, pumpkinseeds, bluegills, a two-ounce five-inch largemouth bass, an eleven-inch northern pike, and a gizzard shad that weighed two and a half pounds. “In order to study fish you have to have them right in front of you,” Willy said. “It’s not like watching birds in a tree.”

  Off New Island, in the main river, under the rising bulk of Mount Holyoke, we swept the seine through a stand of riverweed—“another real nursery area.” The water was just deep enough to soak the big bass on Willy’s T-shirt. In one haul, we brought in two hundred fish: tesselated darters, banded killifish, bluegills, pumpkinseeds, fallfish, yellow perch, rock bass, smallmouths. We picked up six brand-new golf balls. Onto the stage of the microscope Willy slid a banded killifish, less than two inches long. “Fundulus diaphanus,” he said, “a topwater fish with a wide flat head like a pike. It’s sometimes called a tooth carp. With those fins at the posterior of a long body, it can accelerate quickly, like a pickerel.”

  I remembered Willy picking up a shad, in the same boat in another season, and holding it level, as if it were swimming through the air. He spread a fin, exhibiting its fingerlike rays. “These fin rays are the basis of support for the fin web,” he said. “The fin rays themselves are pretty cool. They are made of segments about half a millimetre long. The segments are known as lepidotrichia, and they surround a straight bundle. It’s exactly analogous to a fishing rod. You’ve got a bundle of fibers that form the length of the thing, and then you wrap it—helically wrap it, whether you’re building it out of carbon fiber or fiberglass. These little wrappings go around the length of the fin ray and give it great strength and flexibility. It’s tapered like a fishing rod. It’s exactly analogous to a pole. As you swish that thing through the water, you’re getting a lot of stiffness at the base and a lot of flexibility at the tip. This fin is thus an extremely efficient structure in the water column. It’s self-adjusting.”

  As one would expect in a world-class anatomist, Willy’s tactile talents—his preparation of articulated skeletons, his tracings of nerves—appear to be exceptional. But they stop short of an ability to bone a shad. He once presented me with a whole adult-shad skeleton—easier to produce than a boned fillet. He gave me a block of acrylic containing the complete skeleton of a three-inch shadling. Like me, though, he lacks the dexterity of the fish-market boners of shad. These people, at one time or another, have all been chief residents in neurosurgery either at the University of Pittsburgh or the Mayo Clinic. Or so it seems. So wondrous is their skill, they have been covered in-depth in the New York Times Magazine. A shad-boning wizard in southern Connecticut gave up shad boning in order to teach foil fencing. I have stood for many hours beside such people—mainly at Jack Morrison’s Nassau Street Seafood Company, in Princeton, New Jersey—intent on every move, only to be shown, again and again, that you don’t learn magic by watching a magician. When you take a fillet off a shad, you are freeing it from the backbone. That far, I can go. The rib cage adheres to the fillet. You slice it away. I can do that, too. Now you have two series of fine, sharp, intermuscular bones to get rid of, some shaped like suture needles and others like wishbones. You can feel their severed tips with your fingers. From here on, you need to understand Braille. This is the point at which my dexterity founders. I will not even attempt to grade Willy’s. Invisibly, the intermusculars curve away from those severed tips and toward the fish’s skin. With a long and very sharp narrow-bladed flexible knife, the professional makes two curving cuts, parallel along the margins of one series of bones, and pulls them free in a strip of flesh. If you think that sounds easy, try it. Repeat with the second series—always taking care to cut to, but not through, the skin. You now have a boneless fillet that has four deep longitudinal slits, and has lost a fair amount of its original content of muscle. The percentage gone is the measure of the skill of the cutter. If more than fifty per cent of the original flesh remains, the cutter is above average
. Boned shad fillets are tidied into resemblance of uncut flesh, and wrapped and sold in paper that holds them together.

  The segments into which the muscles of fish are divided—the units that slide away from one another when you disturb them with a fork—are known as myomeres. In some fish, bones develop in the tissue that connects myomeres, “probably to allow a fish to focus where muscular attention is going to be applied,” Willy says. “There are lots of different theories about why these bones form. Most of them have to do with locomotion. The idea is that they provide additional strength. When the muscles contract, they’ll be able to apply their force to the vertebral column.”

  Which helps explain why a shad has so much more power than a rainbow.

  In 1996, Sony Pictures Classics released a Robert M. Young film called “Caught,” in which American shad are, to understate it, megametaphorical. Listed as “Consultant” in the rolling credits is Tony Olivera, a master shad boner at a Manhattan fish market. Under the title is an underwater shot of shad swimming near a commercial net among blue shafts of light. As the action begins, a fugitive drifter (Arie Verveen), running from police, takes cover in a small fish store owned by Joe (Edward James Olmos) and his wife, Betty (Maria Conchita Alonso). They protect him, take him home and feed him, give him a room to stay in and a job in the store. Joe, evidently a master pedagogue, teaches him how to bone shad. “There’s no fish like it,” Joe says. “A thousand bones like tiny needles … Any customer finds a bone, I give him his money back plus a quarter.” In time, Betty and the young drifter are lovers, Joe asleep in the next room. They spawn in the kitchen. They spawn in a shower stall. They spawn in a closet, standing up like Warren Harding. She keeps opening and closing her mouth, like a fish. She closes it on various parts of him—his chin, for example. Mostly the symbolism—from teaser to credits—has to do with shad. After the closet scene comes a scene with the two men as boners. It is noted that Joe bones a shad in four minutes and fifteen seconds (two minutes faster than the best boner I have watched in real life).