Hats of salmon

Go, Moby Dick, go.

I didn’t realise it had been so long. Sorry. Book, head, book, head, book. Book is now done I hope. Head is ongoing. For now, here are some things that I have read and actually got to the end of (another problem with head). And an animal. Always an animal. Normal service I think will be resumed soon.

The best news of the year. By far. Wild orcas have taken AGAIN to wearing dead salmon on their heads and humans have no idea why. That makes it orca 1 - humans 0. AGAIN. This story was widely reported but only the New Scientist headline read “Orcas have begun wearing salmon hats again.” The rest of the headline reads “and we may soon know why.” No, we won’t. And I don’t want us to.

• When journalism is infuriating. European military ships surrounded a Chinese bulk carrier in the Baltic Sea because it was suspected of cutting undersea cables. OK, plausible and even probable. But how? How does a bulk carrier cut undersea cables? It doesn’t fish with an otter trawl, with heavy steel doors that rake along the sea bed. It is not a wartime converted fishing vessel that carries equipment that can snip through cables that tether floating mines, but not low enough down in the water column. Please tell me if you know. Do they carry giant scissors? Do they send orcas down to bite through them? Seriously though: China’s merchant and fishing vessels are increasingly co-opted to do harm. It’s worrying and unsurprising both.

• It seems all my saved articles are water related. Hmmm I wonder why. Here, the “Elon Musk of fish farming” might be able to save your smoked salmon. Why? Because modern salmon farming is bad for salmon and bad for the ocean. If you could dream up a fish to farm, it wouldn’t be a highly migratory and mobile predator that needs to be fed and that attracts sea lice and you then plonk it in the ocean in cages that are like sea lice corner shops. No idea why the journalist thinks calling anyone Elon Musk these days is a good thing, and as for the idea: the best way to farm salmon, if we really must, is in tanks on land. But that is expensive and uses land when there’s all that sea out there. For now, if you are going to pick up a packet of salmon, get some mussels instead. They don’t need feeding and they filter sea water. Tasty, good for you and helpful too.

• In 2003, I travelled to Bhutan to watch a football match between the bottom-two ranking nations in FIFA. Bhutan vs. Montserrat. It was one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. The Montserratians took five days to get to Bhutan and when they got there they discovered the whisky was cheap and marijuana grew wild. But they also discovered that Bhutanese had to wear national costume — I tried on the women’s version and though I looked amazing though not as amazing as the beautiful Bhutanese, it took hours and I could barely walk in the tight silk — and that one side of the street had to be vegetarian one day and the other one the next. It’s a strange place. But also astonishingly beautiful. I wrote about my trip for TANK magazine, including meeting the young man who is now king, and not knowing what to do with my water bottle). Here is a piece on what Bhutan is like now and why the country known for its Gross National Happiness policy is, well, unhappy.

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Animal hero of the week

Outside my friend Lisa’s house, in a Leeds suburb that is usually called “leafy,” there used to be a tree. Like most trees on her road, its roots had raised the pavement and it leaned a little into the street. This was apparently horribly dangerous for humankind in their machines, and one day Lisa found that the tree had been cut. She wrote a note and stuck it to the stump, pointing out that the tree had not been diseased, it was causing no issue, and Leeds City Council had had no right to kill it. A few days later, the stump was removed too. What Lisa could have used was a dog like Ivor. Ivor is a six-year old Labrador cocker spaniel cross, who has been trained to sniff out tree disease. Actually, it’s one disease caused by one virus, but it is an important one and though Ivor would not actually have saved Lisa’s tree, as it wasn’t diseased in the first place, he might save lots of woodlands.

I’m reading a book about smell and learning things. Firstly, that humans think we are crap at smell, probably because we spend so much time with dogs, and that that is not true. We’re as good as mice and have five million olfactory receptors. We’re just not very good at using them. And we are indeed way way worse than dogs at smelling. Ivor’s up to 300 million olfactory receptors have been trained to sniff out Phytophthora ramorum, a Latin name that translates as “plant destroyer.” It’s a fungal infection that caused the great potato blight that in turn (partly) caused the Irish potato famine.

Ivor was trained by Canine Assisted Pest Eradication and also by Forest Research, which are both actual organisations and aren’t we better off for it. In tests, he detected the virus 89 percent of the time. Here is Ivor at work in your local garden centre:

Sniffer dogs have done biosecurity before. In 2012, writes Forest Research, “detection dogs [were] previously used to tackle the outbreak of the Asian longhorn beetle pest in Paddock Wood, Kent, in 2012, where a team of dogs from the Austrian Plant Health Inspectorate successfully helped to detect the beetle.”

Not only that, but in Defra’s government-language account of the project,

Canine Assisted Pest Eradication have also collaborated with Forest Research on insect proof of concept projects, testing dogs’ ability to detect Great spruce bark beetle (Dendroctonus micans) and, more recently, Emerald Ash Borer beetle.

There is a mangle, right, somewhere in a government building, where interesting things are written, put through the mangle and come out as official government publications? If you are struggling to get to sleep, don’t bother with ASMR, read something by DEFRA.

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