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304 pages, Hardcover
First published June 7, 2016
ليس من السهل أن تكون ثعلب ماءو عندها أيقنت بالفعل أنه ليس أمرا سهلا بالمرة و عرفت أن هذا ليس هو الشيء الصعب الوحيد أن أكونه و عرفت أنه كم من ثعالب ماء و حيوانات أخرى تكافح من أجل البقاء.
الأسماك دائمًا في مجالٍ آخر، صامتة وغير مبتسمة، عديمة الأرجل وميّتة العينين.
في تلك العيون المسطّحة الزجاجية، نحن نكافح لنرى أي شيء أكثر من نظرة محدّقة فارغة. لا نسمع أي صرخات ولا نرى أي دموع عندما تنغرز الأشواك في أفواهها وتُسحَب أجسامها من الماء. وعيونها التي لا تطرف - التي تُغسَل على الدوام بالماء وبالتالي لا تحتاج إلى جفون - تضخِّم الوهم بأنها لا تشعر بشيء. مع نقص المنبّهات التي عادةً ما تستحثّ تعاطفنا، نُصبح بالتالي لامُبالين لمحنة الأسماك.
إنّ ما نفشل في إدخاله في حساباتنا عندما يفتر تعاطفنا هو أنّ المخلوق الذي ننظر إليه هو خارج محيطه الملائم. إنّ الصراخ من الألم غير فعّال للسَّمكة في الهواء بقدر ما هو غير فعّالٍ لنا عندما نكون مغمورين بالماء. الأسماك مهيّأة لأن تعمل، وتتواصل، وتعبّر عن نفسها تحت الماء. العديد من الأسماك تُخرِج أصواتًا عندما تتألّم، ولكنّ الصوت الذي تنتجه ينتقل في الماء، ونادرًا ما نكتشفه. وحتى عندما نتمكّن من ملاحظة إشارات دالّة على الأسى - الرفرفة، التقلُّب، فتح وغلق الخياشيم لدى محاولة السَّمكة عيثًا أن تأخذ الأكسجين - فقد نتجاهلها كشيء لا يستدعي القلق، خصوصًا إذا اعتقدنا أنها مجرّد أفعال انعكاسية.
What we casually refer to as “fish” is in fact a collection of animals of fabulous diversity. According to FishBase—the largest and most often consulted online database on fishes—33,249 species, in 564 families and 64 orders, had been described as of January 2016. That’s more than the combined total of all mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. When we refer to “fish” we are referring to 60 percent of all the known species on Earth with backbones.
One of my favorite concepts learned as a student of animal behavior is umwelt—a term created early in the twentieth century by the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. You can think of an animal’s umwelt as its sensory world. Because their sensory apparatus varies, different species may have different perceptions of the world even if they inhabit the same environment.
In the ages since, fishes have evolved visual capacities beyond our own. For example, most modern bony fishes are tetrachromatic, allowing them to see colors more vividly than we do. We are trichromatic creatures, which means we possess only three types of cone cells in our eyes and our color spectrum is more limited. Having four types of cone cells, fishes’ eyes provide four independent channels for conveying color information.
But the champion sniffer among all fishes (as far as we know) is the American eel, which can detect the equivalent of less than one ten millionth of a drop of their home water in the Olympic pool. Like salmons, eels make long migrations back to specific spawning sites, and they follow a subtle gradient of scent to get there.
Taste buds are also more numerous in fishes than in any other animal. For instance, a fifteen-inch channel catfish had approximately 680,000 taste buds on his entire body, including fins—nearly 100 times the human quota.
“But a lion has a lot more charisma than a lionfish. I believe that the main source of our prejudices against fishes is their failure to show expressions that we associate with having feelings…In those flat, glassy eyes we struggle to see anything more than a vacant stare. We hear no screams and see no tears when their mouths are impaled and their bodies pulled from the water. Their unblinking eyes—constantly bathed in water and thus in no need of lids—amplify the illusion that they feel nothing. With a deficit of stimuli that normally trigger our sympathy, we are thus numbed to the fish's plight.
What we fail to account for when our sympathies falter is that the creature we are regarding is out of its element. Crying out in pain is as ineffective for a fish in air as crying out in pain is for us when we are submerged. Fishes are rigged to function, communicate, and express themselves underwater. Many do vocalize when they are hurt, but the sounds they produce evolved to pass through water, and rarely do we detect them. Even when we can notice signs of distress flipping, thrashing, gills opening and closing as the animal tries in vain to take in oxygen—if we are schooled in the belief that they are just reflexive, we may shrug it off as nothing to be concerned about.”