The Little Pudding Wives

How do fish eat when they can’t see their food? After spending several sleepless nights worrying over this, I discovered that the big fish simply opens its mouth to suck in water. The little fish gets caught in the suction and in it goes. So the big fish need not see its prey at all, except for one split second. The octopus, during these reflections, had been busy. With several of his arms wound around his body, like an old man hunched up, he was reaching out with two other arms, and groping about among the debris of clam shells, gravel and seaweed on the floor of the tank. With thoughtful precision he was sticking bits of shell, sand and weed on himself. By the time he had finished, and had drawn in his last arm, it was impossible to distinguish him from the green-gray, slime-encrusted rock about him. In the place where he had been, a white eye leered at me, once. Then it, too, closed and vanished.

It was 2 A.M. and nothing moved, any more, in the aquarium, except the spiny lobster, still swinging his ten knees first to the right, then to the left, with his kindergarten rocking between them. The anemone had drawn in her arms and become a pink blob. The little pudding wives, asleep on the sandy bottom, were heaped together, flat on their sides. In fours and fives they slept on top of each other, all headed one way, like gulls in the wind. The cow and the porcupine fishes, goggling into space, with their chins propped on rocks, hung motionless behind. The wicked lampreys, with their heads floating straight up, gulped and belched water and swayed as they slept. What did these silent beings around me see, feel and hear?

I remembered the story a fisherman had once told me. He fished for trout on a little river near his house, and used, with great success and early in spring, a yellowish-gray artificial fly. This the trout took steadily for several weeks. Then all at once they ceased to rise to this bait. Why? He thought it out. The trees under which he sat to fish had been in bud. During a week of warm days, the buds opened into leaves. The shadow of these leaves upon the stream had altered the intensity of the sunlight. His artificial flies, which had been designed to gleam yellow in the sunlight, now gleamed yellow in the shade. And the fish knew that this was phony. He cast a gray fly. The trout rose. They knew the difference between a fly in shadow and a fly in sunlight. Did they see color, or merely a change in values? Do fish hear? Science says no.

By: davidbunch

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