Experimenting with pleasure

In the last month or so I have had a few conversations with fish biologists, proper ecologist, evolutionary biologist, physiologist type people. In the banter about this and that a question was asked by one of them which took me back a little.

I started this blog as a means of disciplining myself. While whips and chains might come to some of your twisted minds I really mean that the diaries I kept and the thoughts I was thinking were scraps, incoherent babbling, lines of rambling that meandered much without coming to any sort of point or logical conclusion. This is in my nature; confusion, prevarication and missing deadlines are my soul mates. A blog I thought after a little prompting from Mike would be a way of disciplining myself to form an argument, summarise a thought process, post it and then not be able to fiddle with it again. It sits there as a malevolent summary of a distended brain, smirking at me as if saying “you thought what!” Which is fine because the other aspect of writing a blog is that there is nothing wrong with posting on the topic again somewhere down the line and contradicting or completely dismantling ones original post. And I rather like that. A long extended conversation with self (and perhaps whatever deranged commentators drop by to read the drivel) until an idea has been talked, or written into submission.

Although I toy with thoughts about experimentally testing some of these ideas I can’t really say that I have taken that process seriously. I have never sorted a protocol, evaluated what control lines would be needed, decided on the specific trait to be tested. This is for two reasons. One is that anything that actually involves fishing is anathema to a good scientific conduct. For a start the fisherman is a fidgeting mass of contradictions, personal quirks and epileptic mental and physical twitches. To use more than one of this species would be asking for trouble as the tester would have to be controlled for as much as, if not more, than the tested. The second reason is that I never really thought I would get a chance. I work in completely other systems and while a lot of the stuff I do has a behavioural component it couldn’t be said to be close to the way of a trout with a fly.

That is until I was the asked that simple question.

“What experiments would you like to see done?”

“Eh?”

“Well there are some students who are keen to run things and we could possibly rustle up a bit of seed funding if there is some academic rigour attached. The facilities are there so what would you do?”

“You mean seriously or are you just pulling my dangly bits?”

“No, no, seriously.”

“Well, err……”

I’m so articulate when put on the spot. Hey ho.

To dodge the bullet, or at least let it bounce of me like some disgustingly atrophied superhero, I wonder what you, reader, might want to know about trout? If there were a fishing conundrum that had elements of trout biology to it that could be addressed experimentally - what would it be? As you may have seen from this blog one of the main things I have been into over the last year and some is thoughts on learning, discrimination and selectivity. There are an armada of questions that might be addressed; do trout learn (well that’s easy – yes), how quick, how is this modified in different contexts, what is more important, shape, size or colour, can they learn from each other, and on and on – and one is only limited by the parameters defined by trout and fishing, a fairly broad set of conditions. Experimentally one may have to address the question obliquely and attempt not to lose the conclusions direct implications for fishing to an over abstracted methodology. Nevertheless that shouldn’t stop the questions being posed, because we can worry about the tractability of the question in an experimental context later

There is another aspect that is worth pointing out. I wonder whether fishermen would want answers to some of the questions we pose about our sport? Would it take away all that bankside banter, all that stuff, as Keith once said “worthy of a couple of fellows sitting in the shade during the afternoon lull talking about the really important stuff...” I wrote a little about this before and it is worth mentioning Einstein. The physicist said once “the process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.” It is the “…from wonder” bit that is telling. The active preposition implies movement away from a state of wonder to something else, something perhaps less, more mundane. One could consider that discovery kills wonder as Keats did, not a particularly uplifting thought. On the other hand one can consider the wonder in the discovery, the marvel of how it all works. I prefer the discovery and do continually marvel at the way in which organisms have evolved strategies to get them through life. Nevertheless I understand that there are those out there who love the wonder of the unknown, like to savour the moment of happening and feel whatever magic they have experienced tarnished by any inquisition into the what, where and how. Perhaps fishermen don’t want to know that a trout discriminates better to colour rather than proportion?

This leads me to the point. I know that there aren’t many who read the rubbish I spout but if you do drop this way I wonder whether you would answer two questions.

The first is simple. Would you want to know? Would you prefer to be the couple of fellows sitting in the shade genially disagreeing about this and that?

The second is a little involved – What aspect of trout behaviour in a fishing context would you like to see examined? You may, for example, and to continue a theme, want to know something about learning. It is fine but a very broad topic. So, if you can, refine the answer to something specific about learning (or whatever topic you choose). You could also think about how the test should be organized but a word of warning here. Scientists spend a lot of time thinking about how experiments are designed. Many aspects might have to be “controlled for” to get at the answer one originally poses. If I were to ask whether a particular animal preferred blueberries or marshmallows (I don’t know why marshmallow it just came into my head) I could simply place one of each in front of the animal and see which one it ate first. But then I wouldn’t know if it preferred blueberries or preferred something blue, or round, or smaller than a marshmallow. And so it goes on. Don’t worry about that if you don’t want to, it is the question that comes first and the rest is driven by that question.

At the beginning of May I will be chatting again with the real fish biologists about experimental ideas and the feasibility of doing something about them. It is a long shot admittedly, research resources are limited and even if an experimental programme were designed it may not see the light of day. Still, it would be nice to have a range of suggestions to test. Otherwise it will be down to my contorted reasoning which is never a good thing at the best of times.