Friday, January 15, 2021

Opportunistic

My favorite sentence (so far) from Trevor Day’s Sardine (London: Reaktion, 2018): “Sardines are opportunistic.” Which means that “they feed on phytoplankton or zooplankton, or both, depending on which is abundant at the time.” Phytoplankton are plant-like organisms. Day characterizes zooplankton as “drifting animals.”

Opportunists and drifters: it sounds like ocean noir. Sooner or later, someone will be caught in a net.

Sardine is a volume in Reaktion’s Animal series, beautifully printed, with many drawings and photographs.

Thanks, Heber, for pointing me to this book.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

comments: 2

Frex said...

"Ocean noir".
Good one.

Michael Leddy said...

Thank you.

By the way, I forgot about the parrots, which I guessed had to be Monty Python, remembered, looked for the skit, and found a script. I put a link in a comment.