2009/5/11 Joseph McAllister <[email protected]>: > > Can't we all just get along?
I just got to tell you something that's faaaar away from the current topic, but has certain parallels which I find quite interesting. The wild Atlantic Salmon is normally thought of as a large fish, right? Spends its childhood in some river, and goes to sea to grow big before returning to spawn. Well, as a life history, that's just half the story. There's something called "jacks". Male fish that don't bother to go to sea, but rather mature early at a body lenght of only 15 cm. They are so small they can hide between the rocks on the spawning site, and the large sea-going males have no chance to chase them away. When the spawning starts, they quickly enter the scene and fertilise some of the eggs with a little squirt of their own. There is high risk involved, however. The female will immediately start burrowing her eggs, and the jacks can be hit by stones from the process, or by the tail-fin of the female. Dead jacks in egg-pockets have been documented. One parallel to the traffic thingy is that there are two different strategies. Sea-goers and jacks, early-mergers and (not quite sure what to call them, but) zippers. The success of the jack/zipper strategy depends on how many other jacks/zippers there are about. A jack's success is maximised if he/she is the only jack. The more jacks, the lower success. Same for the zippers. The second parallel is that of risk. A third parallel could be fishy goings-on. :-) Jostein -- http://www.alunfoto.no/galleri/ http://alunfoto.blogspot.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
