Melting Ice

Image created by: Moussa. 

 

A Coelacanth, 1938

Victoria Braithwaite was the biologist who demonstrated that fish feel pain. She graduated from Oxford with a PhD in animal behaviour, investigated the cognitive abilities of salmon at the University of Glasgow and began researching the question of whether fish felt pain at the University of Edinburgh. In 2007 she became the professor of fisheries and biology at Penn State University. Her work on fish cognition and pain was detailed in her wonderful 2010 book Do Fish Feel Pain: 

“The origins of fish are millions of years old, but the fish that swim in rivers and seas of today are, for the most part, very different to those that began to develop limbs rather than fins. A few old forms still persist–the coelacanth is an extant lobe-finned fish with quite remarkable history. Fossils of these fish are common from about 385 million years ago and the recent discovery of a fossil coelacanth jaw bone in Australia now puts their history even further back, to around 408 million years ago. Put another way, these fish existed over 170 million years before the dinosaurs roamed the earth. For a long time coelacanths were only known from the fossil record and they were considered to have gone extinct with so many other creatures including most of the dinosaurs, at the end of the Cretaceous period about 65 million years ago– casualties of the after-effects of a huge asteroid that smashed into the Earth. So imagine the surprise and excitement when a trawler off the coast of South Africa caught a fresh coelacanth specimen in 1938. Since that first, astonishing discovery a number of coelacanths have been recovered. It is believed that these fish, little changed in 400 million years, live for up to a century. They spend most of their time in deep ocean waters down to 700 metres. A submersible fitted with a video camera has managed to film these fish swimming. They have a curious way of moving their fins that makes them look like they re paddling rather than swimming but despite that they are still frequently referred to as a ‘swimming fossil.'”   

Do Fish Feel Pain?  Victoria Braithwaite, Oxford University Press, 2010. 

Photograph Bruce Henderson: Coelacanth off Pumula on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast, South Africa, November 22, 2019.

Children’s Birthday Parties in 1940s & 1950s Hollywood

Brooke Hayward wrote a wonderful bestselling memoir, rich in detail, about growing up the daughter of super-agent Leland Hayward and the actress Margaret Sullavan, published in 1977. Her fellow partygoer Christiana Crawford’s memoir Mommie Dearest was published a year later—the title remains a synecdoche for a parent who is anything but:

“At at a typical Hollywood party, there would be twenty to thirty children (at ours, Johanna M. Mankiewicz and her cousins Tom and Chris, Danny Selznick, Jane and Peter Fonda, The Scharys–Jill, Joy, and Jeb–Maria Cooper, Christina Crawford, and Jonathan Knopf were the hard-core regulars), each with his or her own governess. When we all sat down to eat, there would be an attentive line-up of white uniforms packed in close formation behind us. A ritual, even, competitive air infused all these parties, from the entertainment (magicians or clowns, caravans of ponies or elephants transported by truck for gracious rides around the ancestral lawns) to the menu (creamed chicken in a ring of rice garnished with peas, ice cream molded in a myriad of shapes and flavors–frozen animals in nests of green cotton candy were de rigueur in our house–and the birthday cakes themselves, angel food, swagged and flounced with boiled frosting like hoop skirts under white ball gowns). Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina was the most envied party hostess because invariably she offered the longest program: not only puppet shows before supper and more and better favours piled up at each setting but movies afterward; besides, her wardrobe was the fanciest–layers and layers of petticoats under dotted Swiss or Ormandy, sashed at the waist with plump bows and lace trimmed at the neck to set off her dainty yellow curls.”

Haywire, Brooke Hayward, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1977.