SEA ISLE, N. J. -- An article I read somewhere said that Eskimos
have 100 words for snow and that Sherlock Holmes could
distinguish 140 types of tobacco by their ashes.
Distinguishing one type of ash from another was clearly useful to
a detective in late-19th-century England where most of
the killers were probably smokers and there were hundreds of
brands of pipe tobacco, cigars and cigarettes.
And distinguishing good snowflakes from bad is useful to Eskimos
building igloos out of blocks of snow. Pick the wrong kind and
you could find yourself sitting in a pile of slush with a blubber
lamp, fully exposed to the neighborhood grizzlies.
It's like that here where I am on the ocean. At home in the
supermarket, it's just called flounder. But here on a barrier
island where we're surrounded by flounder on all sides, you get
to know that there are summer flounder, winter flounder,
left-eyed flounder, right-eyed flounder, spiny flounder, southern
flounder and large-tooth flounder, plus some members of the
flounder family that are slightly different from the
aforementioned and go by the names of turbot, scaldfish, kite,
sole, brill, topknot, plaice, kliescheplus and dab.
Plus, if they're biting, there's flounder Dijon, flounder stuffed
with crabmeat, flounder Mediterranean with crumbled feta, plum
tomatoes, chopped spinach, garlic and mushrooms, and just plain
fish-on-a-dish.
What's odd about a flounder is that it has two eyes on one side
of its head and no eye on the other side. That makes sense,
foodwise, because flounders spend most of their day laying flat
on their side on the floor of the ocean or bay, blind side down,
looking upwards and sideways with its two top-side eyes for a
shrimp or minnie to come along.
As babies, flounders start out by looking like a normal fish,
with an eye on each side of their head. But after watching the
bottom dwelling lifestyle of the adult flounders in the community
for two months, the one eye of a young flounder migrates to the
other side of its head to join the other eye.
Equally odd, unlike leopards who can't change their spots,
flounder have the ability to camouflage themselves by quickly
changing their appearance. The May 11 issue of the New
Yorker reports on an experiment on this phenomenon conducted
by Dr. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, an Indian-born behavioral
neurologist who is the director of the Center for Brain and
Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.
Ramachandran and an associate bought five peacock flounder, a
species that lives in tropical coral reefs, from their local pet
store. "The men placed the fish on the bottom of four small tanks
against various backgrounds: widely spaced polka dots, a neutral
gray, and two checkerboard patterns," reports The New Yorker.
"The fish, whose natural tendency is to lie flat on the sea
bottom, precisely matched on their bodies the patterns at the
bottom of the tanks -- and they did so within two to eight
seconds, far faster than the hours and, in some cases, days
reported by researchers using cold-water flounder."
I always wanted to do that with my chameleon when I was a kid. He
had no trouble turning green or gray if I put him on the grass or
a sidewalk, but I always wanted to see what would happen if I put
him on plaid. I think I did it once and he just sort of sat there
and lost his will to adapt, sort of like me in Spanish class. I
spent two semesters in Spanish class and all I know is "casa
roja."
Ramachandran also studied an intriguing ailment know as the
Capgras delusion, in which an otherwise coherent victim of a head
injury insists that close loved ones (spouses, parents, children)
are imposters. Rather than the patients being just nuts or
suffering from some convoluted Freudian syndrome, Ramachandran
demonstrated that the severing of neural pathways between the
emotional centers of the brain and the facial-recognition areas
of the visual cortex was the culprit.
In any case, the government's new rules say that we can take home
only a maximum of six flounders per day in Jersey, each 18-inches
or bigger. Last week, I met a guy who sells 65 kinds of iced tea
during lunch and is then paid by the government to walk around in
the afternoon on the docks to check on what we're catching.
(Mr. Reiland is a restaurateur in
Pittsburgh.)
