Rethinking perceptions of fish

Sucker for BBC nature programmes

I have to admit I’m a fan of/sucker for BBC nature programmes. Even David Attenborough’s crustily pedantic pedagogy (Whatever will the BBC Natural History Unit do without him?) can’t keep me away from these dabblings into worlds I will never see, touch or smell with my own technology-constrained corpus.

Sometimes my not-entirely-focusing-on-the-job-at-hand cursor mysteriously drifts past different bits of the BBC website – and sometimes I’m surprised how much there is to discover and learn. For example, just by pulling together a range of disparate factoids, one single page altered my hidebound traditional perceptions of what a fish is – and what a fish can be.

It seems somehow unimaginative and vocabulary-challenged that we use the same catch-all moniker for pearlfish that live inside the anal cavities of sea cucumbers, for hermaphrodite mangrove killifish that can live up to 66 days out of water and for Hadal snail fish that thrive 7.7 km (4.8 miles) below the surface. Kinda’ like using the word quadraped for everything from giraffes to pussy cats to mice.

Perhaps our fish vocabulary – or the nuances of our fish perceptions – could be worked on to emulate the proverbial Greenland perceptions of snow …