"Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl," Some Comments. | 30 comments (30 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Putting on my PN Fez (none / 1)

Using often exhilirating prose that can be quite compelling as nature writing, Ms. Mycio then proceeds to write about a period of weeks, in which she tours the exclusion zone, examining every thing from the radiomorphological changes symmetry of duck weed colonies , to a wonderful description of the 6 meter long catfish that live in the failed reactor's cooling ponds. (No, they are not mutants.)

A six-metre-long catfish? Surely not, I thought. That's a huge fish!

So I did a quick google and found this:

Fishers in northern Thailand netted this huge catfish in the Mekong River on May 1. Nearly nine feet long (2.7 meters) and as big as a grizzly bear, the behemoth tipped the scales at 646 pounds (293 kilograms). Experts say the fish, which belongs to the species known as the Mekong giant catfish, may be the largest freshwater fish ever recorded.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/photogalleries/giantcatfish/

Imagine the six-metre beastie!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Sat Mar 10th, 2007 at 01:59:49 PM EST

Re: Putting on my PN Fez (none / 0)

That's huge, but a 6 meter fish would be about twice the length and 8 times the mass.

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

by technopolitical on Sat Mar 10th, 2007 at 04:05:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Putting on my PN Fez (4.00 / 2)

...swimming slowly below the surface...in the failed reactor's cooling ponds...

It's the beginning of a novel, no doubt about it.

(I'm assuming it should be 6 ft., but that's still almost 2 metres of...fish. Swimming slowly through the murky waters...of the failed reactor's cooling ponds...and then it started: the howling. Wolves! My lord, I thought. Why did I come here? What drove me to stare at things that shouldn't be?

Well, I knew the answer: Edik. But...he had become a fish--so huge, I knew I had to be hallucinating. But there he was, swimming below the surface.

And how did I know it was Edik?

Well...like all fish, this one comes with a...tale...

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Sat Mar 10th, 2007 at 04:16:51 PM EST
[ Parent ]

"Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl," Some Comments. | 30 comments (30 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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