sturgeon

fish story

“Their bodies are extremely fragile and melt rapidly when brought to the surface,” Linley said

In fact, being made almost entirely of a gel-like substance, the fish would die without the crushing pressure holding them together.

starfish eating whale

uk halal

Ampullae of Lorenzini

Electroreception:

At some point during the evolution of elasmobranchs the lateral line pores around the snout developed a sensitivity to fluctuations of the electrical fields in the sharks habitat. These modified sensory organs are known as the ampullae of Lorenzini. They consist of relatively large bulbous pores filled with a gelatinous substance. Connected to the pores are cylindrical canals in which the gelatinous secretions are stored. At the base of each pore is a sensory nerve which transports the electrical signals (which are collected by sensory cells lining the pore) to the brain. Actively hunting sharks may have as many as 1500 ampullae around their snout and head whilst more sedate species may only have a few hundred. The ampullae also react to a lesser degree to temperature and pressure changes.

The ability of sharks and rays to detect weak electrical signals in their surroundings may be one of the greatest factors relating to their survival through the millennia. The organs are sensitive enough for hammerheads and some other sharks to detect the small electrical signals put out by their prey whilst it hides motionless below the sand. In fact the ampullae are so sensitive that they can pick up voltage fluctuations of just 10 millionths of a volt or the equivalent of the electrical gradient of a AA battery with wires put into the sea 1 mile apart. It has been suggested that the widened heads of the hammerhead family may be an adaptation designed to increase the triangulation capabilities of their electroreception. 

When sharks are close to prey it appears that their electrical sense takes over from sight or smell. This would explain why sharks which have been chummed to a fishing or shark diving boat will sometimes attack the propellers and other metal objects rather than the bait which has been put in the water in front of them.

pearl diving - such a general sighing, groning, and weeping, as the like hath not beene seene or knowne in the memory of man

barocco

With respect to the rich pearl earrings above mentioned, it may not be uninteresting to remark, that Elizabeth seems to have been particularly fond of pearls, and to have possessed the same taste for them from youth to even a later period than "her sixty-fifth year." The now faded wax-work effigy preserved in Westminster Abbey (and which lay on her coffin, arrayed in royal robes, at her funeral, and caused, as Stowe states, "such a general sighing, groaning, and weeping, as the like hath not being seen or known in the memory of man") exhibits large round Roman pearls in the stomacher; a carcanet of large round pearls, &c. about her throat; her neck ornamented with long strings of pearls; her high-heeled shoe-bows having in the centre large pearl medallions. Her earrings are circular pearl and ruby medallions, with large pear-shaped pearl pendants. This, of course, represents her as she dressed towards the close of her life. In the Tollemache collection at Ham House is a miniature of her, however, when about twenty, which shows the same taste as existing at that age. She is here depicted in a black dress, trimmed with a double row of pearls. Her point-lace ruffles are looped with pearls, &c. Her head-dress is decorated in front with a jewel set with pearls, from which three pear-shaped pearls depend. And, finally, she has large pearl-tassel earrings. In the Henham Hall portrait (engraved in vol. vii. of Miss Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England), the ruff is confined by a collar of pearls, rubies, &c., set in a gold filagree pattern, with large pear shaped pearls depending from each lozenge. The sleeves are ornamented with rouleaus, wreathed with pearls and bullion. The lappets of her head-dress also are adorned at every "crossing" with a large round pearl. Her gloves, moreover, were always of white kid, richly embroidered with pearls, &c. on the backs of the hands. A poet of that day asserts even that, at the funeral procession, when the royal corpse was rowed from Richmond, to lie in state at Whitehall,—

"Fish wept their eyes of pearl quite out,

And swam blind after,"

Pietra paesina/ l’orée du songe—the shore of dreaming

Meanwhile the tree of life goes on putting out branches. A multitude of new inscriptions is added to the writing in stones. Images of fishes swim among dendrites of manganese as though among clumps of moss. A sea lily sways on its stem in the heart of a piece of slate. A phantom shrimp can no longer feel the air with its broken antennae. The scrolls and laces of ferns are imprinted in coal. Ammonites of all sizes, from a lentil to a millwheel, flaunt their cosmic spirals everywhere. A fossil trunk, turned jasper and opal like a frozen fire, clothes itself in scarlet, purple, violet. Dinosaurs' bones change their petit-point tapestries into ivory, gleaming pink or blue like sugared almonds.

caillois/ the writing of stones

warner on caillois Roger Caillois among the Nonhumans












Their sole desire was to become solid -- as solid and perdurable as the rocks about them. They therefore practiced the rites of petrifaction. When the hated breath at last left the human body, that body was carried to special caves, and there laid in troughs filled with the petrous water that dripped from roof and walls. There it remained until the body turned white and hard, until the eyes were glazed under their vitreous lids, and the hair of the head became like crisp snail-shells, the beard like a few jagged icicles. But this process was merely a long purgatory, for when the body was finally petrified it was removed from its watery trough and carried like a recumbent statue to the halls of the dead -- caves in which the alabaster bodies were stacked, one above the other in dense rows, to wait for their final beatitude, crystallisation. When the body, no longer recognisably human, but rather a pillar of salt, took on the mathematical precision and perfect structure of crystal, then it was judged to have attained its final immortality.

herbert read / the green child /

electric ray

mathew baker master shipwright 1530 - 1613

MATHEW BAKER AND THE ART OF THE SHIPWRIGHT 1. ‘FRAGMENTS OF ANCIENT ENGLISH SHIPWRIGHTRY’

However, aside from its use of perspective, the artifice of Baker’s drawing can be more radically dismantled. Figure 3.2 shows a room with two men creating a perspective image, and might seem a possible source for Baker’s general motif. A closer comparison, looking not at the human figures but at the table on which they are working, shows that the connection is much stronger: Baker’s table is a direct copy from the engraving. This exact source is the final woodcut in Albrecht Dürer’s Underweysung der Messung (1525), a heavily-illustrated treatise on practical geometry directed specifically at painters. As will become clear later, there is independent evidence elsewhere in Baker’s Fragments that he knew and borrowed from Dürer’s text. But the point here is that Baker was deliberately and self-consciously assembling his identity as a shipwright and designer, pulling together elements from the prestigious artistry and mathematics of Dürer.

The Venetian Vettor Fausto commented in 1530 that

if knowledge of the architecture of buildings on land is so thoroughly difficult, what should I say about that of the sea, where everything is drawn out not by straight lines (which is an almost easy method) but by curves and variations repeatedly made to them?13

Stephen Johnston, ‘Making mathematical practice: gentlemen, practitioners and artisans in Elizabethan England’ (Ph.D. Cambridge, 1994)

The decoration of the few major ship draughts is possibly the glory for which the whole work is celebrated. They are indeed finely worked, highly detailed, and some still glistening gold and silver. Others have beautiful, subtle colour washes. In most there is a riot of geometric pattern and scrollwork, even on mere merchantmen, and many display carved figures apart from the figureheads. There are numerous heraldic shields in Fragments, most notably as pavesses along the waists of the three galliasses, but also in the window of the shipwrights workroom (p8). None are identifiable, and so throw no light on the identity of Baker’s patron (if any), but several have marked similarities with the commonest form adopted for their arms by the London craft guilds - a chevron between three appropriate implements or products.

Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrighty Richard Barker

IV International Reunion for Nautical Science and Hydrography, Sagres 1983.

Published in Revista da Universidade de Coimbra, Vol XXXII, 1986, pp 161-178.

fishy

Ford Driver's Fishes