Complex Numbers

Carp-al Tunnel

Time for another entry in "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+].

This one, selected at random as usual, features koi: Feeding Frenzy  .

Ever notice that koi look like kaiju goldfish? There's a good reason for that, apart from most fish having a similar body plan adapted to swimming: they're both carp.

Apparently, though, they come from different subspecies. While goldfish were bred in China over a thousand years ago,   selective breeding of koi is a more recent Japanese development. For the benefit of my fellow Americans with a limited sense of historical time, by "recent," I mean about 200 years ago.  

And goldfish aren't really gold. By which I mean, no, of course they're not made of the chemical element Au, but their coloration always struck me as being more orange than yellow, though it can vary. Not everyone calls them goldfish, either; in French, the name is poisson rouge, which it doesn't take three and a half years of French lessons to know means "red fish."

They're not red, either, but different cultures have different conceptions of color.

No well-known metals are red or orange, so "goldfish" it is.

Koi obviously aren't limited to the orange color, but the point here is that none of these fish are the product of natural selection, unless you take my philosophical stance that we're part of nature, and so anything we accomplish, from air pollution to plastic to miniaturized orange carp, is also natural. "Artificial selection" or "selective breeding" are perfectly good terms for the process, though.

This strikes me as similar to dog or cat coloration. I don't mean different dog breeds, but, like, how a collie can be sable and white or black, sable and white. Or the different patterns of spots on dalmatians. While some koi resemble calico cats in coloration, the calico trait apparently doesn't breed true in cats, being instead a genetic thing associated with the feline X chromosome.

I have heard, but can't confirm, that before we nearly extincted tigers, some of them could also display the calico trait. Which I'd pay to see. As tigers are largely Asian in range, well, that brings us back to the origins of goldfish and koi.

All carp, incidentally, are food. I mean, everything is edible once, but carp has been a staple in many cultures, despite difficulties in its preparation (it's bony as fuck). In Eastern Europe, it can become gefilte fish, which, well, some of my people consider that to be food, whereas I do not.

As pretty as they are in koi ponds, the Asian carp is considered an invasive species in the US. I wrote about an attempt to contain them on the Mississippi River in a blog entry a while back: "Dam It" . In that entry, I said:

That lock was closed a few years ago, but the structure remains. The reason for the closure was to stop the spread of Asian carp, an invasive species, upriver. So when I was touring the lock, looking into the waters upriver, what do you think I saw? Go ahead, guess.

That's right. An Asian carp.

On the plus side, I guess I caught my first Pokemon.