Word: plankton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Early on, the Fisherman pays his respects to the food chain: "It takes 50 pounds of silversides to produce a five-pound blue. It takes 500 pounds of plankton to produce those silversides. It takes 5,000 pounds of microscopic sea plants to produce those plankton animals . . . 'All flesh is grass.' " Yet there is not an ounce of false sentiment in his speeches: "It probably doesn't make sense to talk about pain in a fish . . . an angler who had caught a perch told of finding himself unable to remove the hook without taking one of the fish's eyes...
...late parents' retirement home in a tiny coastal village in Cornwall. He settles there because he has nowhere else to go, but he looks seaward and makes odious comparisons: "In Bom Porto, the Atlantic was milky green, thick as soup. At this time of year it swarmed with plankton, and in certain lights you seemed to see the sea wriggle with life. It was easy to imagine the first things crawling out of it and starting in on their colonial adventure. This northern sea was different, more coldly sophisticated. If you thought about the things that came...
...million tons of anchovies, a fifth of the world's total fish catch. Now, the warm equatorial water is blocking the upwelling of nutrients from the sea bottom. The result is economic disaster. The anchovies are largely gone. Coastal waters have turned into a sludge of rotting plankton and fish. Sea birds, whose droppings (guano) are an important source of fertilizer, are dying off for lack of food. When the last severe El Niño struck in 1972, the reduced catch of the cheap anchovies raised poultry prices in the U.S. by more than...
Terres also explores the arcane richness of animal behavior and man's beliefs about it. Ibis guano, the reader learns, enriches the ecology of the Everglades by increasing plankton growth; a loon can be imitated on the ocarina; geese occasionally become homosexual, pair-bonding for life even when heterosexual partners are present; an auk's egg is a marvel of engineering, shaped so that it will not roll from its cliff-edge nest...
...Fred Gwynne '51 as an oafish Pentagon general are particularly effective in their roles, and Madeleine Kahn, though not blessed with a very demanding part, provides some of the funnier moments at the Center. They are all able to keep their jokes alive, and Arkin's evolution from minuscule plankton to neurotic 20th-century man should be recorded as one of the funnier scenes in contemporary movie-making. But one scene doesn't make a whole movie. We can't expect Brickman to be brilliant for the entire 90 minutes, but there are times he falls so far short...