Despite my professional sympathy, this is a chilling insight into the uncompromising fierceness of the scariest fish:
Sand tiger foetuses ‘eat each other in utero, acting out the harshest form of sibling rivalry imaginable’. Only two babies emerge, one from each of the mother shark’s uteruses: the survivors have eaten everything else. ‘A female sand tiger gives birth to a baby that’s already a metre long and an experienced killer,’ . . . .
A new book, Demon Fish, receives an approving
review from Theo Tait in the London Review of Books. Tait muses over our disproportionate reaction to the shark danger:
Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to be hospitalised by a Christmas tree ornament than by a shark. Meanwhile, to supply the shark fin soup trade alone, an estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year. Many shark populations have declined by 70 per cent or more in the last thirty years.
Sure, tell that to my amygdala. As the reviewer concedes, they're down there below the surface, and they eat us alive. My amygdala doesn't find Christmas ornaments daunting in the least. No one's going to make a fortune directing a blockbuster movie about people that stab themselves with glass icicles, or whatever it is they do to put themselves into hospitals at Yuletide (sounds like there's an untold story there).
9 comments:
Christmas ornaments are under my control--at least nominally. I can avoid drug users and angry people, and drive carefully and not fool with anybody else's lady.
But sharks and men shooting up theaters come out of the blue.
And Christmas ornaments don't eat each other in utero.
We were down on the beach all last summer, swam every day. One day, walking along the same shore we walked along every evening, we found a shark washed up dead on the beach. It was still quite well preserved, and a touching reminder of how -- when you swim out even a few feet into that salt-filled water -- a whole unseen world lies below.
No one's going to make a fortune directing a blockbuster movie about people that stab themselves with glass icicles, or whatever it is they do to put themselves into hospitals at Yuletide...
Could be a dark comedy, I suppose.
As for the unseen world, night diving emphasizes that like nothing else I know.
Turns out, I guess, that the hospital visits involve kids who tried to eat the ornaments.
So really, what we've learned is that children are more dangerous to themselves than sharks are to all humanity.
We knew that, I think. :)
"Despite my professional sympathy"
HEY! :-)
When I was four we had an ornament that was shaped like a trumpet, and actually played. It broke while I was blowing on it and I coughed up little shards for days.
I was never a terribly smart child, but I've gained a bit of wisdom over the years.
'They eat their siblings in the womb' makes 'they eat their young' sound pedestrian.
Post a Comment