After a long hard day at the coal face of drug dependence research, I was in the bar and rewarding myself with a mojito. Someone said “I’m going to go and look at the sharks before I go to bed.”
Oh for flip’s sake. I’ve been worrying about barracudas which can (at most!) chow down on a finger or two of mine, and it turns out that swimming in the same water as me were sharks, which (if the movies are to be believed, and I’m not sure they ever lie) would bite me in half, swallow the lower half and let the upper half get washed up on a beach somewhere.
So I went to look at the sharks. It turns out that they shine a light onto the water, which has two effects: First, it attracts fish, so the sharks come and eat the fish (you’d think that would put some evolutionary pressure on the fish to go somewhere else – maybe in a few hundred generations they will). The second effect is that people can see the sharks. Now, I’m no ichthyologist, but there were four or five big fish shaped things in the water, one of them was very dark grey, and the others were sort of pale gray, and they were swimming about in what I would have guessed was a shark like fashion. They were four or five feet long, and wouldn’t have been able to bite me in half, which was something of a relief. Although I suspect that they would have been able to bite off my whole hand, rather than a finger or two.
