Fish Whiskers in Muddy Waters

This was really weird. There were about 500 little Catfish in the very shallow water at the edge of the frozen lake. Most of them were not alive but they all had their heads sticking out looking up to the sky. The whole pile was wiggling and squishing because new fish were squirming out from between the others and jumping up on top of the fish head platform. Around the Catfish platform was a moat of hundreds of beached silver minnows.

It’s mysterious and difficult to Google because of the massive amount of information about fishing but this is what I think is happening: The top foot or so of the lake is frozen. This little patch on the edge melted first and so if there was any pressure under the ice it would escape here carrying with it anything not nailed down: lots of little fish. Then somehow the fish must have been trapped here in shallow water and there are so many of them they ran out of oxygen in the water so they struggled to sip oxygen from the surface of the water. And then there’s just nowhere to go and they all suffocate.

If this is what’s happening, some of them might be OK as more of the ice melts. But it was curious that none of 200 ducks hanging around were not interested. I wonder if there was something else wrong with them to make the ducks uninterested.

Have you ever seen this? What do you think is going on?

These fish have whiskers, but they are not vibrisae like cats whiskers that are so touch sensitive that they are used for sonar. Fish whiskers are barbels, they are touch sensitive, but they have a lot of olfactory sensors and taste buds on them. Fish use barbel whiskers to taste their way around. These fish live down where its dark and muddy where there is not much light. Animals like this often have visual cortexes (I sort of love and hate that they are called that even in animals who aren’t using vision to visualize the world) that are informed by their most sensitive body parts. This Catfish tastes the world. 

Slithering Sniffers

I know where the Gartersnakes hibernate. Its a spot in the forest that I call the Snake Pit because one spring I saw them all waking up together. In retrospect what I saw was probably a mating ball of a hundred snakes having an orgy while they left their hibernaculum.

Agitated Eastern Gartersnake  (Thamnophis sirtalis ssp. sirtalis)

Mummy Gartersnakes give birth to baby Gartersnakes. They don’t hatch out of eggs and there can be 100 babies in a litter! Although it’s usually closer to 30. New born Garters slither strait out into the world ready to hunt and explore and defend themselves.

Gartersnakes communicate with smells. They attract and fool each other with pheromones and they make a stink when they are frightened. I didn’t know that when I saw this snake. She was not happy so see me. She flicked her tongue and reared up to let me know that she was using this spot and I should go away. I kept my distance and snapped a quick pic with my long lense, but I wish I’d sniffed the air.

You can see this snake’s forked tongue. She’s using it to smell me. Each prong collects chemicals from different parts of the air so she can sense a chemical gradient and understand where smells are coming from. Basically she can smell in 3d. So can I but not very well. 

Two of three Gartersnakes tangled in a mating ball

Gartersnakes vary in color from place to place. Ours are mostly black with a snazzy yellow stripe, exactly like the garden hose that makes me jump every time I walk passed it. On the East Coast they are brown, and also make me jump because they look like a species I haven’t met before, but they are the same species as our black and yellow ones, just wearing different styles.