Sir Prawn a lot and a missing mullet

Back in the days of summer, when I was still in my twenties, we went to catch some prawns. My office mate needed some to use in his project looking at ocean acidification, so we waited for a sunny-ish afternoon and headed for the beach. We needed both species of prawn commonly found in this area, Palaemon serratus and elegans, and the bigger the better. We arrived, eat some ice cream and headed off into the rockpools. I began sweeping through the seaweed with my net willy nilly – occasionally getting a fairly large one, or something else interesting, but it quickly became unrewarding work. After a while we discovered it was more fun, and a lot more productive, to stalk the prawns (and no, im not talking about Facebook). Carefully moving a rock would uncover a whole gang of elegans which, by using the nets in a finely-tuned strike of upsettingly accurate co-ordination could be swept up for the bucket. Soon we had over a hundred and set off back for a sun burnt pint in the pub. Oh how I miss you summer days.

Soon afterwards we heard of a new prawn catching technique. We went to the harbour and tried it out – throwing a net on a rope into the deep water and suspending it at somewhere near middle depth. In the net was a mesh bag containing cat food which oozed out - like the shark-attracting ‘shit’ that Chief Brody shovelled over the side of The Orca in Jaws - attracting prawns from far around. The cat food did its job. Pulling in the net 20 mins later, we had caught some serratus that were approaching Jaws proportions.

In Tesco they would have been sold as King Tiger serratus. I’ve rarely been so happy.

During the first trip we had also brought back a few tiny fish fry that had been swimming in the rock pools. We put two of these into a tank in the aquarium and fed them a variety of the smallest things we could find. They soon began to grow and after some false hope that they might have been bass, we became fairly sure that they were baby mullet. Other things began to appear in the tank as well – starfish, limpets, anemones, prawns, a crab. They must have been tiny larvae in the water with the mullet, but we hadn’t noticed them until they had grown to eye-recognisable size. 6 months later, I was taking in some artemia to feed the now thriving mini ecosystem, but something was not right. Only one fish swam towards me in the search of food. The mullets were only one. I looked around the tank, then outside the tank, then the floor, but there was no sign. I emailed the technician who had spent the most time looking after them:

Will,
Bad news.
We are a mullet down.
No evidence of escape.
No body.
Not sure what to do.

Will had noticed the day before but didn’t want to tell me. I started to think about what might have happened and jumped to the conclusion that the crab was to blame. He had been getting bigger and bigger, and was now the size of a 1p piece. I thought if he could have got hold of the mullet, he probably could have eaten it. I checked the tank again for signs of the body but still nothing.

Dam that crab, he’s been getting too big for his boots for ages.

Before he could eat the other one I made the decision to take him out and put him in a tank on his own with some stock mussels.

Ha. You’re not smiling now are you? Mullet murderer!

Then this morning I was talking with Will about what to do with the remaining mullet and we suddenly saw the body. At the other end of the rack, a level below, the dried out shape of the missing mullet was suddenly all too obvious. Our eyes followed the path he must have taken; jumped up through the gap between the tank and the lid, flapped his way along the rack for a bit, then fallen through into the tank below.



I apologised to the crab as I returned him to his home tank.

A Tradegy

When I was at Uni up north I used to play 5-a-side football for a staff team. We were generally older, slower and less fit the whipper-snapper undergrad teams, but we partially compensated by having a greater experience of the game and better organisation. The team was quite an interesting mix. We had the local MP in goal who was excellent at debating with referees about their dodgy decisions. I used to play midfield with a chef from Barbados, right behind our striker ‘Fletch’. He was a particularly interesting character – a scouser, an ex-monk, and now a religious studies lecturer. He apparently used to be the monk with the thought of the day on the 90’s breakfast TV show ‘The Big Breakfast’, but I can’t find anything on Google to back this up. We had an average season, but not knowing many people in a new town I really enjoyed playing and having some banter with the guys. Fletch organised a Christmas meal, and everyone, particularly Fletch made me feel part of the team and we laughed and joked our way through that evening and the next season. Eventually work dictated that I move away and I rarely, then never, saw the team.

I got sent a link to a Facebook group I could check the latest season’s results, and I heard that promotion was on the cards and that Fletch had got married and just had a little girl. Then last week I heard that Fletch had been to Australia on a conference, and had died from a heart attack.

Time and distance apart had softened this blow to me, but it’s always a horrible shock when you hear of someone’s death, especially someone who was so young and had just started a family.

'A Tradegy' just doesnt seem to do it justice.

Too Smart to climb Everest Buddy

I don't think Id ever climb Everest. At present I'm not rich enough, or have the necessary experience, but if, say, I won the lottery on Sat (I might have you know, Ive not checked yet) and had the time and money to spare, I still don't think Id risk it. The difference between a good sea level physical challenge and high altitude mountaineering is that you cant prepare for how your body will respond to the extreme altitude. You can train all you want, get to the fittest you've ever been, then train for another 5 years and feel superhuman. It wont matter a jot. Sure, your fitness might help you on the lower slopes, and it will certainly help you recover and make the climbing days easier, but in terms of altitude related sickness it wont help you in the slightest. The two main altitude sickness killers- HACE and HAPE (build up of fluid in the brain and lungs) are thought to be genetically based and currently impossible to test for or predict. Low oxygen in the air makes you breath faster, your vascular system swells and speeds up to get more oxygen round your body, this can lead to a leakage of fluid and very quickly to death. Survival isn't anything to do with your training and preparation, your fitness, age, or anything else, its about your genes, and what methods of dealing with low oxygen your body has hard wired into it.













The reason im sharing this is because I watched the BBC Horizon programme last night called 'Doctors in the Death Zone' where a group of doctors climbed up Everest and conducted experiments on the slopes into the body's response to a lack of oxygen. They took an exercise bike to camp 4 at 7950 m which was an incredible sight- I just wish they had shown it strapped to one of the Sherpas back. They recorded the lowest ever blood oxygen content in a human that was still alive when they took an arterial sample from one of the team at 400m from the summit. It suffered, like most Horizons, from an over the top narration which tried to add more drama and suspense than was necessary, but it was still an amazing piece of work. The photography alone was fantastic. The small screen of YouTube doesn't really do it justice, but the footage of the team reaching the summit was absolutely breathtaking and gave an amazing insight into the challenges facing the climbers. TV like this is brilliant. Look out for it.

Discus

When I say to people that i study discus they give a strange look and wonder what Im talking about. I hope a few have had the thought that i study maximising the distance that discus are thrown by the British Olympic team- perhaps looking into discus aerodynamics or density or structure. I even tell some that I study discus reproductive biology. I really hope some of these people have had the doubt, if even for a moment, that the discus thrown by the British Olympic team might actually living things, things which are in need of breeding programme in order to get the best quality traits enhanced for the competition discus.

The truth is I am studying discus fish. When i tell people this they seem glad that the awkard moment when they didnt know what i was talking about has passed, and are so relieved that they dont actually give discus fish much thought.

It was a sad day last week when we had the fist death in the discus camp, and 'male #3', or 'ill-boy' as he was getting called increasingly frequently went off to the big chest freezer in the sky(lab).

A moments silence.