Ellen Sima

For the love of fish.

I was nine years old when I caught my first fish. Exhilaration pulled

at my belly as my lure was dragged, zigzagging along the bank of

the Tuross River until my fish took its final, unceremonious leap into

the air. It thrashed pointlessly on the line, like a yo-yo run out of

spin. Dad unhooked it, held its writhing body to a rock and broke its

neck with a knife, quick as a flash. It was my job to scale my catch;

its glittery scales dropped like sleet on the sand as I scraped the

knife along its body, watching its colours slowly dull. It was the first

time I’d seen a vertebrate die, the first kill I was directly responsible

for, and in hindsight I’m surprised by how little it affected me.

For most of my childhood, fish came to me once a week as

crumbed, golden rectangles on my plate. Fish fingers were how I

knew I was getting bigger, as I progressed from 2 to 3 to 4 fingers,

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always one behind my brother. All I knew about these crunchy,

faceless fish was that they were ‘good for my brain’; they were

entirely separate from the fish I saw at the aquarium when we’d

visit Sydney in the summer holidays. Under those echoing blue

tunnels we’d crane our necks to watch the Perspex-stretched rays

glide over our heads, or sharks cruise in orbits round the tank. We

never really saw the fish; they were what you looked past, the

shimmering curtains onto bigger, stranger, more frightening things

that you could buy a plastic figure of in the gift-shop.

There were many things I didn’t question as a child. One of them

was fish. I’d seen them, eaten them, held their dead bodies, but

they’d never fascinated me. Fish were a collective term, like trees or

stars. They were scenery. Never one of the animals that people

wanted to save, fish didn’t belong with the large things the world

had told me were beautiful and worthy, or with the small things I

thought were cool and weird. If it hadn’t been for Richard Flanagan I

might still have have found my way to fish, and from there to

biology, I don’t know. I do know that I didn’t find my love for them

in the ocean or the classroom or on my plate; I found it at 14 years

old, sitting in my bedroom, reading a story about a convict from the

1800s.

Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan is a fictionalized account

of an actual Van Diemonian convict, William Buelow Gould (1801-

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1853). Despite never fully separating himself from his life of crime,

Gould was one of the most significant artists in the Tasmanian

colony; his Sketchbook of Fishes was produced around 1832 and is

now a UNESCO document of world significance. It provides the first

record of a number of common species, and is still used by

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research

Organisation (CSIRO) as a reference-work today. Flanagan uses

twelve of Gould’s painted fish as chapter titles, and these fish are

fundamental to both characterization and plot development. In each

chapter, paragraphs are dedicated to describing – and

anthropomorphizing – these fish, and what first struck me, having

only been accustomed to reading about beautiful people, was the

beauty of his fish:

Its luminous colouring was exquisite – its trunk pinkish red,

purple blacks and silver blues spotted with yellow dots,

billowing around which were its mauve leaves. Yet there was a

serene grace about it that was also the oddest melancholy. As

well as wonder, it shimmered sadness.

It might seem absurd, but until I read this passage I had never

realised how exquisite weedy sea dragons are. I flipped through the

pages to the glossy reproduction of Gould’s painting and felt a

surprising sense of intimacy in seeing this animal through the eyes

of a convict from the 1800s. And as Flanagan depicted, one by one,

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this series of twelve fish, he set the stage for my introduction to one

of the primary tenets of normative science: that living things are

worth conserving.

And when I finished the painting and looked at that poor

leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to

wonder whether, as each fish dies, the world was reduced in

the amount of love that you might know for such a creature…I

imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which

everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained,

and where Science knew absolutely every species and phylum

and genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared

along with the fish.

I don’t know if it was Flanagan’s intention to switch his readers onto

ecology. According to all its critical interpretations his book was a

meditation on colonialism, an indictment of racism, a book about the

human will to survive. But for me this passage conjured up, probably

for the first time, a deep understanding – an understanding that has

remained with me ever since – of the sadness of human

environmental impacts, and of why the loss of fish meant

something. It also piqued my interest in its judgement of science;

did I think that taxonomists drained the life from the things they

categorised? Weren’t Gould’s paintings, which had made feel closer

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to fish than I had when seeing them alive, scientific? And if science

didn’t lead to a love of nature, what other paths were there?

Simon Mawer outlines a common viewpoint: that a writer who is a

scientist is a contradiction in terms; “scientists are logic and facts;

writers are imagination and fantasy; and between these opposite

poles lies a profound gulf” (2005). At high school, my own conviction

in the divide between literature and science couldn’t have been

more pronounced. In English we learned about the depths of human

experience, about passion, obsession and love; in science we

graphed water boiling and grew bean shoots in old egg cartons. But

just as I was gazing blankly over diagrams of cells and food chains in

biology – at things I would later become intensely interested in – I

continued to chase fish in books; Hemingway’s The Old Man and the

Sea, Hughes’ ‘Pike’, Yeats’ ‘Song of Wandering Aengus’ all

strengthened my fascination. And as John Muir said, “when one tugs

at a single thing in nature he finds it attached to the rest of the

world”. Fish led to me the ocean, and to my first encounter with

creative non-fiction in Carson’s The Sea Around Us, which I valued

for its metaphorical prose before I truly recognised it as a scientific

work. And it was from this platform, from behind the pages of fiction

and literary non-fiction books – never having been the microscope

gazing, magnifying glass weilding, bug-netting kind – that I began

the slow tip-toe into science.

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But I didn’t know how to reconcile my love of literature and creative

expression with my growing interest in science. There was no cross-

pollination between these subjects at school, and while I was

privately amassing my own collection of beautiful science writing, it

didn’t seem to relate to what I learned in the classroom. Samuel

Taylor Coleridge best encapsulates the divide I saw between science

and literature when I was fourteen: “poetry is opposed to science...

The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or

communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry

is the communication of immediate pleasure” (1998). Now, over a

decade later, I strongly disagree with this statement on both fronts.

Good poetry, and good fiction, point towards the truth. Stories and

poems “compel readers to distill information into insights, ideas,

and a deeper appreciation of the complexity of existence”, and in

doing so can “forge their own cutting edge of discovery” (Painter,

2012). In my case, when Flanagan put natural history painting at the

center of his story of obsession, I discovered a new field of study –

marine science – that may have remained flat to me without feeling

Gould’s infatuation with it. For science can seem dispassionate, its

human face having been deliberately masked to give it stronger

claims to objectivity and impartiality. Unfortunately, this image of

the unemotional scientist, writing their reports and analyzing their

statistics, is what perpetuates Coleridge’s second assumption: that

science is not associated with pleasure.

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Scientists’ findings are often cordoned off in the dusty corners of

society, too obscure to be relatable, too complex to be easily

digestible. This is, to a certain degree, inevitable, as it is not always

possible to convey the complexities of each specialization or

discipline. But this does not mean that the pleasures and passions of

these scientists should be left unspoken:

You don’t display obsession, not true obsession. You learn to

hide it. You recognise the indifference or incomprehension

that creeps into the eyes of the listener. You learn the art of

self-deprecation, the art of crypsis, the art of blending, mouse-

like into the background. But beneath your bland and neutral

exterior, you create confections of fantasy.

This fictional excerpt from Mawer’s novel Mendel’s Dwarf paints an

evocative image of the hidden passions of the scientist. It shows

that beneath ‘bland and neutral exteriors’, scientists thirst for

discovery and creativity. These are universal traits that can speak to

an the public on a human level; as such, they need to be

emphasised by science communicators to show the public that

science, underneath a veneer of detachment, can incite hungry

passions. Flanagan, a writer with no scientific background, was the

first to show me that studying the natural world can grab you by

your guts. His fictionalized Gould closely studied the “manner in

which fins passed from the realm of opaque flesh to diaphanous

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wonder, the sprung firmness of bodies… the way scale dewlapped

with scale to create a dancing sheen” (240); and in spending so

much time with the fish, they began “to enter [him]… seeping

through [his] pores by some dreadful osmosis” (241). For Gould, it

was not “possible to spend so long in the company of fish without

something of their cold eye and quivering flesh passing across the

air into your soul” (241). And for me, it was not possible to become

so engrossed in a character that felt so strongly about fish, and not

come away wanting to know more about biology and ecology.

If the public is presented stories of scientists who are inspired,

enthused and excited about their science, then they will be more

receptive to what they have to say. For it’s simple but true, that

“they [the public] don’t care how much you know until they know

how much you care” (Satterfield, 2001). When writers “fold the lives

of scientists more directly and frequently into narrative”, they show

people that “science is really not all that different a category of

creative human endeavour than, say, writing a beautiful haiku”

(Eldredge, 2009). And if they are able to do that, they may be able

to reach a group of people that traditional science wouldn’t normally

speak to. As for every person who sees the “beauty of a simple

addition problem or chemical formula, or learns why birds sing

songs in spring” there seem to be many more who find it hard

because it “strikes them as alien and seemingly irrelevant to their

lives” (Eldredge, 2009). It is these people – in short, people like me

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at fourteen years old – that need to be targeted by science

communicators, because they bring different sets of skills,

appreciations, and values to science. Stories – well crafted fiction

and non-fiction stories – can humanise science and, in doing so,

speak to those people who find it disaffecting, which will better

allow these people to see themselves enjoying and participating in

science.

In addition to humanising the scientist, fiction and poetry can be

excellent mediums for expressing scientific ideas. Many branches of

contemporary science rely on “increasingly inaccessible features”

(Painter, 2012) that are impossible to directly experience; a good

example lies in theories of parallel and multiple universes. Physicist

Brian Greene suggests that there are exact duplicates of our solar

system where “every possible action, every choice you’ve made and

every option you’ve discarded” has been played out. Yet while he is

convinced that these theories are correct, he admits that – even as

a physicist – he cannot feel his immersion in curved space-time as

he feels other forces, such as gravity. Painter (2012) suggests that

these complexities can best be explained in stories:

She thinks of all the bodies she has had: the little girl’s body,

the desiring and desirable body, the childbearing body, the

body that moved through space, that swam and danced and

ran and ran, and now the aging body... none of the bodies

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lost, all contained in the same envelope, reliving their

histories.

This passage from Mary Gordon’s fictional novel Pearl encapsulates

the infinite possibilities of parallel universes in an accessible and

germane manner. It allows the reader to immerse themselves in the

possibilities of advanced physics, without being bogged down by

jargon or overwhelmed by complexity.

Fiction and poetry will never eclipse the profundity or explanatory

power of science, nor will their utility as entries to the human heart

ever be made redundant by scientific discovery. As such, we need

both – science and literature – if we are to holistically communicate

with the public. For in combining well-written narratives with

scientific information, science communicators could better reach

people on both an intellectual and emotional level. In our first

SCOM408 class we identified the way we thought the public

engages with science:

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I feel that most methods of science communication – science shows,

documentaries, articles, exhibitions, etc. – focus mostly on the

upper path in this diagram, concentrating on education and sparking

interest in hopes of challenging opinions. Narratives can tap into the

lower path – what I see as the ‘undercurrents’ of science

communication – by speaking to human emotion and identification

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to instil a deep desire to learn more. And the great thing about

science communication is that it’s these paths are not mutually

exclusive; if done well, intellectual and emotional stimulation can

occur concurrently, bolstering and informing one another to produce

deeper understanding. For example: I want to go to the aquarium,

peer through the glass to see a porcupine fish, looking slightly

fearful, its swollen body bobbing behind the glass. And next to its

tank I want to see, alongside information about its native range,

taxonomy and ecology, a reproduction of Gould’s original painting

and an excerpt from Gould’s Book of Fish:

[The] eyes were big mournful orbs behind which a [pair of]

gills [sprouted]. A boulbous scaled body grew outwards from

behind the eyes, the over-inflated entirety of which [was]

covered in small spikes, and at the end of this prickly football

a tail could be seen protruding.

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It was this prose that grabbed me at fourteen, in a fictional book of

beautiful fish. Now, a decade later, this passion has seen me

through an undergraduate degree in biology and marine science,

into SCUBA diving, and through a research project at the Australian

National University in the behavioural ecology of freshwater fish. In

a 60-tank laboratory I studied the interactions between an

endangered native Australian freshwater fish – the purple-spotted

gudgeon – and an invasive egg-eating fish – the oriental

weatherloach. This research was my first real encounter with doing

science and I found it exciting that, years after Flanagan showed me

how from the pages of a book, I became obsessed with fish of my

own.

But this is not a linear story; “the only people who believe in straight

roads are generals and mail coach drivers” (Flanagan, 2001), and

while I’ve spent the past ten years becoming increasingly immersed

in science, this has led and fed back into my love of stories and

poetry. So when I was working on my research project, submerged

in the static, windowless humidity of Lab 313 with its rows of

bubbling tanks housing my fish, I wasn’t just recording data; I was

watching the pelagic fish swim endless laps, flashing their silvery

profiles like spinning coins, and the benthic fish roving over the tank

bottom, sucking over mucky gravel with the industry of cows

chewing over a field of grass. I found the most effective way I could

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express my experiences – not my results, but my human responses

to the animals I worked with – was through prose. But I gained more

than that; what most inspired me to write stories of science were

the people I met in the tearoom, or at the faculty barbeque, or in the

lab next door. Because when I scratched the surface of these

scientists’ stories, I found them brimming with dedication, passion

and obsession.

Brendan Ebner is a freshwater fish ecologist and conservationist and

had published close to thirty peer-reviewed papers. But the

achievements listed on his webpage aren’t what make him

fascinating. It was the story of his time before he was a recognized

scientist that made Brendan such an engaging character. After

finishing his PhD, he struggled to find a post-doctoral position

studying the species he loved: the freshwater moray eel. The

drought had just broken, so funding to freshwater ecology meant

paid positions were extremely limited. So when Brendan couldn’t

find a job, he decided to forge ahead on his own. For months he

scoured e-bay, picked through garage sales and took weekly trips to

the tip, building a hodge-podge collection of fish tanks that he built

into a laboratory in his shed. For years he spent his free time holed

up in his makeshift lab, conducting his research on eels as they

swirled in and out of his sights and got tangled in his thoughts.

Eventually, backed by his backyard research, Brendan was able to

take up a post-doctoral position at James Cook University where he’s

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working to establish the freshwater moray eel as a flagship species

in the rainforests of the Wet Tropics. Brendan’s love for eels saw

him from his head to the shed to the public, and his story is one I

will never forget.

It’s hearing stories like Brendan’s – not of Nobel Prize winners or

paradigm-shifting discoveries like the Higgs boson – that make me

want to communicate science. For it is his humanity, rather than his

discoveries, that will inspire people to become involved in science,

and to find their own small patch of the world to delve into with

obsessive enthusiasm. If I had never been inspired by Flanagan’s

story of fish, I might not be where I am today; for this, all that I can

do is be grateful that roads to science can be found in fiction, and

try to help other people find them as I did. My experience is

evidence that “storytelling and listening to stories can help unite our

souls with science” (Satterfield, 2001). And now, having participated

– even in at such a basic level – in the progression of scientific

research, I think it goes one step further. That science, with all its

passion and patience and discovery, can help ignite our souls with

stories.

Ellen Sima

References:

Coleridge, S. T (1998) in Collins Dictionary of Quotations. Harper Collins: United Kingdom.

Eldredge, N (2009) To Teach Science, Tell Stories: We Need to Incorporate the Human Dimensions of Individual Struggle, Creativity, and Adventure into the Way We Teach Science, Issues in Science and Technology 25(4): 81-84.

Flanagan, R (2001) Gould’s Book of Fish. Random House: North Sydney.

Forbes, P (2005) Poetry and science: greatness in little, Nature 434: 320-323.

Mawer, S (2005) Science in Literature, Nature 434: 297-299.

Painter, M (2012) ‘On the Cosmology of Literature: Parallel Universes and Meaning Beyond Information’ in Art, Literature, and Passions of the Skies, Analecta Husserliana 112: 3-26.

Rowe, R. C (2000) Poetry and verse: an ideal medium for scientific communication? Drug Discoveries & Therapeutics 5 (10): 436-437.

Satterfield, D (2001) Stories Connect Science to Souls, The Diabetes Educator 27: 176-179.

Ellen Sima