Bibliography of Lake Malawi Biology (with emphasis on fish systematics, ecology, & evolution). Dark Waters - The Morning News. In the early morning of Oct. Oregon Dept. There was no evidence of struggle, no footprints, no suspicious debris—just the still brown water where seven giant fish had been swimming the day before. Headlines like “Sturgeon didn’t walk off on their own” and “Game police pursue poachers” flooded the back pages of blogs and newspapers for little over a week. Photos of the five- foot- long, cartilage- cased creatures appeared in print like children on the back of milk cartons. The lead investigator couldn’t explain how the thieves had maneuvered past the locked gate next to I- 8. And, because sturgeon are enormous and impressively muscular, the sheer planning and manpower it must’ve taken to wrestle these 2. While mature sturgeon can produce hundreds of thousands of dollars in black market caviar, each of these fish were appraised at a measly $2. White sturgeon are the largest freshwater fish in North America, and Oregon’s Columbia River Valley lays claim to one of the last self- sustaining populations on earth. The species is not actually white but rather, as Brian Doyle clarifies in his essay “The Creature Beyond the Mountains,” “as gray as the moist lands in which it lives, the temperate rainforest west of the Pacific mountains and east of the not- very- pacific ocean.” The last of the bony freshwater fish, sturgeon are smooth and snouted and have the eerie, loping stroke of saltwater sharks. They’re rimmed in dagger- shaped plates called “scutes” and have virtually maintained their appearance from the dinosaur days, 2. They can grow up to 2. Needless to say, they are weird, and alluring, and the apple of Oregonians’ eye. As soon as reports of the theft came in, an online enthusiast’s forum at i. Fish. net flooded with a barrage of deeply impassioned comments, about the (as one user flagged it) “stomach turning” news: “something has to be done to people like that”; “Scum bags!”; “What is the world coming to?”; “That is terrible, those fish are so great to look at”; “I don’t understand what would make a person do something like this.” One hopeful user speculated that the culprits might have been radical environmentalists standing against animal captivity. Another was pretty certain it was meth heads. Your power is turning our darkness to dawn, roll on, Columbia roll on was the song Woody Guthrie wrote about the Bonneville Dam for the Works Project Association in 1. Those tours were always the same. Dane Wigington geoengineeringwatch.org. Fish are dying, wildlife is dying, the entire web of life is dying, but willful denial of verifiable realities continues to. A government official walked us through the turbines, the spawning beds, and the windows looking onto the fish ladder where we’d watch Chinook and steelhead leaping against the current to get back home. The sturgeon pond was always the last stop of the day. It was outdoors, set apart from the facilities, and surrounded in the deep shadowy green of Douglas firs. This was where the largest specimens were kept, including the eldest and most impressive captive—Herman. A couple of steps down brought you to an aquarium- style viewing window where, squished together with all your classmates, you could watch the fish drift ambivalently by. They were ancient, spooky, the last vestiges of the Triassic period, and they looked right at you. Courtesy the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. It was a funny act of observance in part because while my mother and I got along very well, we were not your Thelma and Louise- type bosom buddies who might divulge secrets and salve wounds as we crossed the high desert. Instead, we were rather silent about the things that haunted us most: my brother’s arrest, my stepfather’s illness, my imminent departure from home. Secondly, I don’t know how most people observe their graduation from high school, but this road trip seems to me now indicative of the peculiar no- frills celebratory style of the Pacific Northwest, that region which wrested itself from religious tradition and the “old world” and so finds itself without time- tested coming- of- age ceremonies. Instead of a fancy dinner or a new car, you drive with your mom into the wilderness until some inner voice says you’re ready to move on. We set out from our house in Portland on a drizzly afternoon, and stopped just forty- five minutes east at the Bonneville Dam. Still so close to home, I worried when my mother exclaimed, “We’re on an adventure!” and began to dig into the cooler of peanut butter sandwiches. As we strolled around the fish hatchery in the rain, I was burning from my first urinary tract infection, though I didn’t know what it was at the time. I couldn’t handle my mother’s looks of nervous pity, so I didn’t say anything—just pissed glass in the stone bathrooms at Bonneville’s gates and hoped it wasn’t something horrible. There’s nothing like revisiting a childhood pilgrimage site with your mother to make your first sexual malady feel like a ticking time bomb. She snapped my photo by the entrance sign, and then we wandered to the sturgeon viewing area. We stood at that picture window which looked into the green depths of the pond, and Herman, the 7. Rhymed (Abbreviated) Translation by Nicholson, 1950. Hearken to this Reed forlorn, 2. Breathing, even since 'twas torn. I’d seen Herman, who was actually female, in this habitat numerous times on those class field trips, but I felt newly haunted as she glided past the window like a prehistoric submarine. In the interpretive center, I read that the females don’t reach sexual maturity until they’re 1. So for 1. 8 years they float around and do what? Take in the sights, grow, sleep, avoid nets, eat sewage and crayfish and beer cans and candy wrappers that have sunk to the river floor. And if they’re not caught, do they follow this course ad infinitum, occasionally giving birth until they pass away at 1. My mother and I drove east, chatting a lot but running out of things to really say.
We stopped for milkshakes in a ghost town called Mitchell, and then walked along the town’s only street, which curved like a horseshoe. Most of the buildings were vacant, their Western facades still intact: a stagecoach, a package store, a defunct curiosity shop called “Whole in the Wall.” And then half way down the length of Main Street, in the middle of the road, we came across a cage holding a sleeping black bear. It was, I guess, just the kind of thing you sometimes find in Oregon. I do not remember whether the next few days took us through the eastern or western part of the state, only that we grew quieter. Before we’d set out, my mother had collected vintage travel guides, history pamphlets, a set of maps from the 1. We kept running into dead ends because we were determined to rely on these alone. We met an old woman who owned the bed and breakfast in Ione who told us stories about her late husband “the cowboy,” and her years as a hairdresser, and her long- time client who was “into that violent sex stuff.” We got lost on a lumber back road and found an abandoned 1. We were surprised to find that the toilets in the pool house still flushed, and that the spring was still bubbling in its concrete pool, and that there was a cordless phone receiver plugged in and apparently powered on the floor behind a decimated lunch counter. We drove and drove and weren’t ever sure where we were going. My mother sat next to me in her sunglasses and Columbia Sportswear gear, quiet and smiling. Occasionally she’d have hot flashes, and I’d have to help her out of layers while she kept her hand on the wheel. Maybe she was nervous because I was about to go to college, or I was nervous because I was detaching, but we didn’t talk about that. Rather, we pointed to things out the window or commented on weird details of the landscape on our walks. I grew anxious that I’d leave for good before we figured out what we needed to say to each other, whatever that was. We spent our last night in the back of her Forrester in a parking lot near Wagon Tire (Population: 2) reading Joyce’s “The Dead” the whole way through. I got choked up when Gabriel cowers at the bottom of the staircase, watching his wife’s expression as she listens to the distant piano play “The Lass of Aughrim” and he realizes her never really knew her at all. All along the way, I kept thinking about the white sturgeon, and their ability to have outlived absolutely everything, to have never been in a rush, milling slowly, singularly, through the silty depths. How did they manage such perspective? Before the Columbia dams were built, they were anadromous, spawning in the river and maturing out at sea, but of course they are landlocked now. What does this feel like, to not be able to complete your life cycle? I suppose this would be a moot point if it weren’t for the fact that at this very moment, there are sturgeon swimming around that river who were alive long before the dams existed, who have been to the ocean, and who will never go back. Bumping up against the annual migrations, or a giant old- timer breaching the surface, those white settlers no doubt, for a time, thought they were monsters. In fact, white sturgeon growth potential is so great that some scientists hypothesize a regular fasting period takes place in order to maintain ecological balance—an evolutionary trait that brings to mind some Godzilla- esque creature that, with fewer scruples, might overtake us. Sturgeon have often been mistaken for monsters of various kinds. The Menominee Indians tell a myth of Mashenamak (or “Big Sturgeon”), which was in the habit of devouring the village’s fishermen. So they called on a brave demigod who volunteered to be swallowed whole in an effort to prevent more widows. There’s a whole society of people who believe that the Loch Ness monster is a very old sturgeon. In 1. 98. 7, one washed up on the shores of Lake Washington where a monster had been rumored to live for many years. In middle school, my friends and I hung out on public docks overlooking the Willamette River in Southeast Portland. One time, perched in our usual spot in the rain, we saw what we perceived at the time to be a river monster. A long, charcoal- colored, eel- shaped thing floated by, belly up.
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