Something Fishy

To celebrate my sister the marinophile's birthday tomorrow, I am proud to present a set of interesting and entertaining fish stories. Here's to the Monkeyfish! Long may she and my brother swim!

The Economics of Why Lobster is suddenly so cheap: a great job at conservation, a poor job at cooperative marketing (aka collusion, but we'll let that pass), and an economic recession.

A fish who can look through its own head. It looks up through a transparent head to see the outline of fish above it closer to the sun. Scientists are now delighted to learn it can in fact turn its eyes when it turns vertical to make its move on a smaller fish above it.

The Law of Unintended Consequences similarly swims up and bites environmentalists' swimming trunks again: Dolphin-safe tuna disaster. "If you work out the math on this (and you don’t have to, because the environmental justice foundation did), you find that 1 dolphin saved costs 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks, and almost 1,200 small fish."

And, only tangentially related because of the Fish McSandwich, How McDonald's conquered France, its #2 most profitable area. "... McDonald's was a blight on the American landscape, ... and in a contest between Roquefort and Chicken McNuggets, I knew which side I was on. But implicit in this attitude was a belief that McDonald's had somehow been foisted on the French; that slick American marketing had lured them away from the bistro and into the arms of Ronald McDonald. However, that just wasn't true. The French came to McDonald's and la malbouffe (or fast-food) willingly, and in vast and steadily rising numbers. Indeed, the quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin' it—the architects of McDonald's strategy in France were French."