by John Hersey
Bluefish have—
S: I have a bluefisk! It feels like a big one.
F: They’re still famished after their spawning expedition. Their hunger makes them extra vigorous….Yes, it’s one of our standard five-pounders….
By the way: Twice, now, you have shown signs that you were being won over to angling, when you asked me if you could catch just one more, to throw back into the sea after you’d caught it. Do you want to do that today?
S: I don’t know whether I’m being “won over.” I’ve certainly been made aware—by you—of the many riddles in the experience of fishing. But to give an honest answer to your question: Yes, I’d love to try for another one!
F: Fine. I’ll change lures….
S [casting]: But go on. You were getting to the part about bluefish and hearing.
F: Bluefish don’t have external ears, of course, but like other jawed fishes they have pairs of sinuous labyrinths, tiny spelunker’s mazes, inside their heads, forward of the gill covers, with three little chambers on either side, each containing a minuscule calcified ear stone, the rattlings of which tap sound codes into sensory hair-cells. The uppermost of the three chambers is a kind of gyroscope, registering yawing, pitching, and rolling movements, so the fish can always be in full control of its place in its fields of vision and action. The other two chambers are for hearing. Some kinds of fishes have a direct linkage between their ears and their air bladders, which latter serve, drumlike, to amplify sounds; the bluefish isn’t one of these, but its air bladder probably does have some indirect effect on its hearing. Researchers using that tank at Sandy Hook found that blues can hear in a range—much less than ours, but sufficient to their needs—of from less than one hundred to about three thousand five hundred cycles per second.
Now, you asked whether blues can communicate with each other. Not in the sense of conversing. They don’t utter intelligible sounds, in our terms. But they are certainly in touch with each other. The combination of their hearing and their lateral-line sense makes them keenly aware of where they are in relation to each other, whether schooling or not. If Ghanaians can hear swimming sounds, so can they. Besides keeping track of each other, they can pick up the water sounds made by a school of bait, and move toward it, and so violent is their chopping of their victims when they reach it that the gnashing and clashing of their teeth are both directly transmitted through the water and also resonated in their swim bladders, and are thus doubly drummed out in helpful broadcasts to other ever-hungry blues.
Of course, they can hear Spray’s propellor. And, since we catch them while trolling, you might think it doesn’t alarm them. But that’s probably just another example of the irresistible power of their feeding response. The sound eventually gets to them. I’ve found that it’s no use running back and forth more than two or three times over a hole where you know they have been.
Blues’ aural communication, such as it is, is coordinated with other kinds of message giving. You remember the inflamed spot by the pectoral fin at spawning time, and the flashing pelvic fins while they were feeding in the tank. And they see and respond to each other in schooling.
S: You’ve talked a lot about the air bladder. Would you—oh-oh. Hold it. Fish!…
F: Nice work….Back it goes. By the way, there comes a fog bank, up the Sound. The breeze must be dropping.
S: Should we go in before it gets to us?
F: We don’t need to hurry. The rip of the shoal is a perfect navigational guide, slanting in toward the tip of the Chop.
You were asking about the air bladder. This organ gives fishes in water what the astronauts have in the upper air—weightlessness. Without it—and, in that case, without constant motion and constant expenditure of energy—they would sink to the bottom. Scuba divers achieve weightlessness under water with the help of buoyancy compensators, which are, in effect, air bladders worn outside instead of inside. The fish’s bladder is a gas-filled sac in the upper part of its hull, just below the backbone and kidneys. In some primitive fishes this bladder evolved into a kind of Aqua-lung, for air breathing if they lived in oxygen-poor water or in rivers that dried up at times. In most bony fishes it is solely a hydrostatic device. Blues have closed, self-contained air bladders. Large, specialized cells within the sac generate gases, mainly nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, which inflate the little balloon.
Water pressure increases with depth. At the surface, water pressure is equal to air pressure; about thirty feet down, it is twice that. You’ve heard of tunnel diggers getting the bends from too rapid changes of pressure when they surface. Blues have to contend with that same problem. When they stop feeding at the surface along Middle Ground and go to the bottom to leeward of the shoal, their air bladders are compressed to half the size they had at the surface, and they become heavier than water—or they would, except that the specialized cells pump in additional gas to restore buoyancy. Then, ascending, the bladder swells and needs relief. Blues, with closed air bladders, aren’t able, like the fishes I mentioned earlier, to fart out surplus gas with mousy squeaks. Instead, part of the bladder wall has a dense network of capillaries which enable the blood to absorb the excess gas rapidly. Thus the air bladder serves to maintain constant buoyancy in the blue, much as the trimming tanks do in a submarine. Man’s first working submarine was a wooden craft with a greased leather skin three hundred fifty years ago; fish have had swim bladders for millions of years.
S: In other words, Fisherman, Nature’s a jump ahead of you and me.
F: Many a jump, Stranger.
Here’s the fog. Like a wall of steam. Now you see the Chop…now you don’t.
S: It’s like being in a small room.
F: Which direction is West Chop from here?
S: I’ve forgotten! I’m lost!
F: No you’re not. We have the rip.
We were talking about sound under water. A fog seems to bring the world to your window. I’ll turn the engine off. Hear that thumping? It sounds fifty feet away. That’s the Islander, the Woods Hole–Vineyard Haven ferry, just turning out of the Woods Hole channel. Listen! Hear that bell? That’s at the other end of Middle Ground, three miles away.
S: I hear it. “Full fathom five…” Sea-nymphs ringing my father’s knell.
F: Yes, that’s apt: there are ghosts and spirits in any fog. I think I know what I’m doing, but I still get the shivers when I’m alone in a fog out here. Let’s mosey in. I’ll follow the rip till its last jog, then turn southeast until I see shore—there’s plenty of water right up to within ten feet of this side of the point. There it is.
S: How huge the Chop looks. Surprisingly swollen, like the just risen moon.
F: Now I steer one hundred degrees by the compass for six minutes….One hundred twenty-five for ten minutes—have to take a wide berth here, there are rocks inside the tip….Then—but it’s clear in here, as it so often remains between the Chops, when the wind is out of any southerly quarter….
[In the kitchen:] Tonight we’re going to Italy, via the palate. Barbara and I spent a year there and yearn to go back. I’m going to coat the fillet with pesto—pesto, that is, minus Parmesan cheese, which is death to bluefish. I whirl up three not-too-tightly filled cups of basil leaves, three cloves of garlic, three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt, and two tablespoons of pine nuts—you can get them at the health-food store on Beach Road—in the food processor. All right, it’s pasty. I’ll blend in a half cup of olive oil. Presto! Pesto.
Skin the fillet. Use olive oil to grease the broiling pan, and brush a thin coat of it on the meat side of the fillet to keep it from getting too dry. Broil close to the flame; Canadian rule….Soft all the way through—spread about three tablespoons of the pesto on the fillet (I’ll freeze the rest, with a thin skin of olive oil on top). Put it back in the broiler for just a minute, till the sauce bubbles but not till it browns….Pronto!
S: Viv’ il pesce azzurro!
F: Viv’ il nostro lavoro!
SONG
by William Shakespeare
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them,
Ding-dong bell!
August 20
FISHERMAN: Let’s see on the way out whether we can fish for snappers today.
STRANGER: Where do you look for them?
FISHERMAN: Do you see that brief surprise of totally green real estate on the near side of the tip of the Chop, where houseless meadows meander down to the sea? See, off it, those two tall piles someone put out in the water long ago, to pulley-moor dories with? Snapper blues hold a convention just there, starting each summer in mid-August.
S: Why there?
F: It’s a spa for baby blues. First of all, it’s shallow, about eight to ten feet deep; the water’s warmish. Because of the shelter of the point, the currents eddy weakly there, yet the home fluid keeps moving. The bottom is rocky, and there are tall wavy weeds for them to hide in.
Yes. They’re there. We can try for them.
S: How in the world can you tell? We must still be a quarter of a mile away.
F: See those little specks of birds flying back and forth a few inches off the water? Those are laughing gulls, and every summer, as soon as the snappers foregather, they start skimming around, waiting for schools of the baby blues to drive schools of whitebait up to dimple the surface, setting the table for the gulls’ lunch. Wings announce the presence of fins.
Steer for the pilings a minute. I’ll rig the rod….
Here we are. We can just idle the engine and drift.
S: What a lovely, slender rod—like a swift line drawn by a quill pen.
F: Isn’t it a beauty? That rod belonged to Dashiell Hammett. Lillian Hellman gave it to me. I always hope I can catch a good plot with it. I’ve rigged it with the lightest of lines, spun by a monofilament spider. On it we put this tiny, silvery Kastmaster, which swims like wounded whitebait. I should warn you that when you cast you must snap the bail and start reeling the moment the lure hits the water; otherwise it’ll sink and get caught in the weeds. Try a cast. Just a sharp flick of the wrist…and, yes!—out it goes for a hundred feet! Nice!
S: How big will the snappers be?
F: How small, you mean. Five to seven inches, now.
S: How could they be that big? You said the blues had come in from their spawning just the other day.
F: Some marine biologists have speculated that there may be two distinct genetic stocks of bluefish off our east coast, one of which spawns off the Carolinas in the spring, the other in summer months in the so-called Middle Atlantic Bight, within the great curve of the shore from New Jersey to Massachusetts. One observer thought he found consistent differences between the two breeds of blues—analogous to the differences, I guess, between southern and northern writers. The southerners were said to have slightly larger heads, bigger eyes in proportion to their heads, longer upper jaws, and differences in various fin lengths from those of their northern cousins. (I think it’s the size of the head that counts with writers.) In any case, the northern stock goes out to spawn in relays from early July to early August, and I presume that the snappers that show up hereabouts in mid-August—these right here—are small fry of some early July spawning by blues somewhere along the coast between New Jersey and here.
S: That might be a long voyage, coming here. How do those tiny things make it?
F: I have to warn you, first of all, that everything I can say about the blues’ spawning is iffy. It’s mostly guesswork. There’s pretty good evidence that their spawning takes place out on the edge of the continental shelf—the place where the bottom drops off to the abyss. That means our friends swim from thirty to a hundred miles out to sea for sex.
S: No wonder they’re hungry when they get back!
F: No wonder. Anyway, their offspring are pelagic plankton at first—drifters on the surface, that is—and it’s thought that the larvae and small fry probably ride the inner edge of the Gulf Stream awhile and then are swept shoreward by eddies of the Stream and by various onsetting currents. (These currents have been found to exist by oceanographers who dropped tens of thousands of marked bottles in the sea and then kept records of where they fetched up.) In time the little snappers swim into the shallows of estuaries along the coast, and to warm-water hotels like this one under the jaw of the Vineyard. They grow here very fast, preparing for the great migration southward in the fall.
Look over the side. You can see a cloud of them, maybe ten feet across—hundreds of them in a tight school. Those are the babies. If there are tailors around, one-year-olds, they’ll school separately. Smaller with smaller, bigger with bigger. Birds of a feather. This is partly a matter of safety—the big will eat the small—and partly a matter of energetics, because the swimming speed of a twelve-inch blue is much faster than that of a seven-inch blue, and of a twelve-pound blue very much faster than of a seven-pound blue. It costs smaller fish too much energy to keep up with their seniors. There’s a hydrodynamic advantage to schooling, too—the leading fish penetrate the water envelope and make it easier for the following ones to move through it; but there is an offsetting disadvantage, in that oxygen is depleted in the middle of the school. As the school veers, followers take their turns at leading, so that energy remains fairly distributed. Blues form a very tight pod when they’re threatened and frightened, but when food presents itself, they’ll break up and free-lance, one by one.
S: Wait! I’ve hooked one! How right you were: With this delicate rod and light line, it’s as if I were wrestling with Leviathan.
F: They’re feisty, aren’t they?…I’ll get it off the hook and drop it right in the bucket. Notice that it’s a little deeper in the hull and flatter than the adult blue.
S: But go on about spawning. What happens in their courting and mating?
F: No one knows. Up until now, no scientist has ever surprised blues in the primal scene. Guesswork: Aristotle asserted that female fish swallow the males’ sperm and thus conceive. It takes a first-rate male philosopher to dream up pregnancy via fellatio. Of course that won’t wash. I can tell you about the habits of three species other than blues, which have been watched in the act by scientific voyeurs, and the only assurance I can give you is that these types’ sex habits are bound to be different from those of our friends.
One of the most fascinating fishes, when it comes to propagation, is the little stickleback, a prickly specimen which seldom grows to more than three inches long. At courting time, the male, decked out in brilliant nuptial colors, stakes out a territory among weeds in brackish water, and if any other well-dressed male comes around his keep, he darts at it with his jaws open, as if to dine, and drives the trespasser away. He now builds a nest, a kind of tunnel with a round sandy floor and walls and ceiling of stems gummed together with the slimy mucus from his flanks. By this time his dress has become even more brilliant than before: its reds more penetrating, its black cells contracted to minute stippling, and bluish crystals sparkling through the skin from beneath. A female, a silvery roly-poly Rubens figure, approaches. The gorgeous male does a dance of loops and zigs around her, and then begins nudging her toward the nest, nipping at her fins if she tries to turn away. She enters the tunnel, with her head and tail sticking out at the ends. The male butts her tail repeatedly with his snout, and she deposits her eggs. Then this feminist fish leaves the nest, never to return. The male enters at once and pours his milt over the eggs, and exits.
Next, polygamist that he is, he flags down two or three more females, in sequence, and jigs them into his lair. One by one, the feminist dames beat it. For seven or eight days the male fans water over the eggs to aerate them. When they hatch, child care is all his. He guards the brood and keeps them tightly together, training them to school. If some wander, he takes them in his mouth and spits them back into the crowd. In time, when they have graduated from kindergarten and are used to school, the father suddenly gets bored and pallid, and goes off to join the grown-ups—perhaps to find out what the women are talking about now.
[Stranger catches another snapper. It is lodged in the bucket. As is his habit, the Fisherman keeps right on talking.]
Then there’s the dogfish. It’s a small shark, two to three feet long. I catch one of the nasty things around here, once in a while, when I’m bottom fishing for fluke and flounder. They’re harmless; just ugly—though not necessarily so, of course, to each other. Like other sharks, dogfish copulate. The eggs are fertilized inside the female. The male has a pair of sexual organs called claspers, and to inseminate his partner he coils himself around the waist of the female, his claspers inserted in her cloaca, in an embrace which appears to an anthropomorphizing human observer to be delightful; his sharky head declines sidewise toward the female’s torso, with the under-face turned up and the mouth drawn back in a lascivious grin.
With the sex habits of the codfish, we may be coming a little closer to those of the bluefish—though in fact we have no way of knowing for sure. As the spawning time approaches, the male cod becomes aggressive, and he creates a watery sphere of territory around his own body—a territory that moves with him as he swims. He will not let other males or unripe females inside this bubble of his authority, and gradually, after numerous encounters of colliding territories, there emerges a bullying order of males, one which may help to ensure that vigor is perpetuated in the race of cod. In time a ripe female, gliding with easy assurance, enters a dominant male’s bowl of space. The male, seeing her, raises his dorsal fins for a moment, and then approaches her. He faces her, about a foot away, and begins a dance of veils. All his median fins are fully erect but loose at their hinges, and as he lithely bends his body back and forth, they wave their invitations, and meanwhile he alluringly opens and closes the fans of his dorsal and first ventral fins. He turns. She follows him. Now he wants to persuade her to go up to the surface—for the fertilized eggs will only be able to survive as plankton on the skin of the sea. He continues his display, he grunts (as cod can do), and he nudges her ever upward. During all his nervous flashing, she moves smoothly and calmly, taking her time. When they reach the surface, he suddenly swims over her, slides down one side of her, and turns upside down, belly to belly with her, clasping her with his pelvic fins, their genital openings pressed one to the other. She emits her eggs, he his milt. The female swims out of the male’s ball of fire and joins other cod. He is still hot and charges intruders, uttering threats.
