Down to the sea in mesh coveralls
I’m just not at all sure about this picture, which came in the mail. It doesn’t have the unquestionable provenance of our recent fish series, and I’m not even sure what it is we’re looking at.
But, hey, it’s as good an excuse as any to mention a recent New York Times story about researchers upping the estimate on how many venomous fish there are in the sea – at least 1,200, they now figure.
The story on August 22 tells the tale of William Leo Smith, a pet-shop boy who reached into a waste bin for a telephone that had dropped in there and got knocked flat by the poison on the quills of a dead “fuzzy dwarf lionfish” that had also been trashed. By way of trying to figure out what the hell happened, he turned, over the course of 20 years, into an ichthyologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. See the rest.
