When I was a FISH

Tales of an Icthyologist by Mike Bruton, (Jacana Media)

As I have matured, so have my reading tastes. I have evolved from the magical fairy tales of Enid Blyton I so loved as a child, to the fantasy realms of JRR Tolkien and Terry Pratchett that I lived in as a teenager. In my twenties I devoured fiction titles of all genre’s, especially those with a literary and romantic bent and I revisited Jane Austin and Barbara Trapido with an obsession that was only slightly less compulsive than the Tolkien addiction of before. In my thirties I found love and circumnavigated the world. With these two revelations, I found that only poetry could fill my heart and that non-fiction, with a bent towards the natural history and science sections, scintillated my mind. This wonder that we call earth, and especially her oceans, I discovered, are endlessly intriguing. I want to learn everything I can about it all. And what better way to achieve this than through books. So imagine my glee when Jacana Media asked if I would like to review a recently published book by one of the leading fish biologists in Africa, Mike Bruton.

For me, reading this book was like going on a dive trip with a wonderfully intelligent, educated and erudite instructor. I could sometimes almost picture sitting round the camp fire in the bush behind the dunes of the Northern KwaZulu Natal coast line with the ocean still rushing in my ears from a day out at sea, listening to the tales of this scientist. What a life he has lived, what wonders he has seen.

Having dived some of the same sites that he so eloquently describes, I felt an especial thrill in revisiting the underwater realm through his eyes, from watching fish in rockpools for hours as a child to the pure adrenaline rush that is Ras Mohammed.

And then there is the Coelacanth. This ethereal fish of mid water caves, electric blue and marbled like the ocean floor in the sunlight. The presence of this fish is felt throughout the book, hiding in crevasses and dark underwater caves in family groups. It is bigger than I thought it to be, a fully grown human kind of size. Blue. Still. Quiet. It is tantalizing, and in all likelihood, reading Bruton’s words is the closest one will ever get to experiencing this somewhat mythical creature.

This is a fast-paced, highly readable book, in which Bruton not only recounts tales from his extraordinary life, but also explores and discusses the various issues and topics in which he was involved as a scientist, conservationist and science educator. He worked with Professor JLB Smith, author of one of the books I covet most in my fathers bookshelf. He was director of the Icthyoligy institute in Grahamstown for many years, he pioneered searches for the Coelacanth off the coast of Southern Africa and in the Western Indian Ocean, made many new discoveries about the fascinating biology of this extraordinary fish and campaigned internationally for its conservation. He was deeply involved in the establishment of the Two Oceans Aquarium. He is one of my new found hero’s and I hope to meet him or at the very least, hear him speak one day, perhaps when he unveils a living Coelacanth, sculling its four fins quietly in a cave, in a well oxygenated tank that is mostly dark, with a filtered blue light, as of sunlight that has been stripped of colour by the depths…

When I was a FISH: Tales of an Icthyologist is a wonderful book. I can’t wait to read it all over again.