I was recently shown a photograph of something from a local beach that I hadn’t noticed before. It resembled a giant honeycomb growing over a mussel-covered rock. The thing was a colony of Sabellaria alveolata, the honeycomb worm. The individual worms are only about four centimetres long, but each builds a tube made of sand grains and tiny pieces of broken shell, all stuck together with mucus, which is attached to neighbouring tubes, forming an extensive colony that looks like something a bee or wasp might have made. At low tide, the worm hides inside the tube, but when the tide comes in, it extends its tentacles to catch microscopic food particles. Most Sabellaria reefs are found between tide marks, although the largest one in Ireland, the Wicklow reef, is sub-tidal.

The word ‘worm’ doesn’t apply precisely to any one group of animals. Some creatures are called worms that are not worms at all – I wrote before about the shipworm, which is a bivalve mollusc. A woodworm is a beetle, so is a glow-worm; an inch-worm is a type of caterpillar, a slow worm is a legless lizard. Several other unrelated creatures, most known only to zoologists, are called worms too, such as arrow worms, acorn worms, bootlace worms and tongue worms.  

The worms that ordinary people are most likely to encounter belong to the phyla Platyhelminthes, Nematoda and Annelida. The platyhelminths are the flatworms, tapeworms and flukes. Flatworms are mostly free-living. Some are brightly coloured sea creatures; others are invasive garden pests such as the Australian and New Zealand varieties. Tapeworms resemble very long strands of tagliatelle, made up of dozens of units that are actually bags of eggs. They are all parasitic, living in the digestive systems of many vertebrates from fish to pigs, and humans too if you don’t cook your meat adequately. Flukes are also parasitic; the best known in Ireland is the liver fluke, Fasciola hepatica, which infects sheep and cattle. The serious tropical disease, bilharzia, is caused by a fluke called Schistosoma.

The most abundant worms are the nematodes or round worms. There are many thousands of species, mostly microscopic, living in every known ecosystem from the Arctic to the ocean floor; in some soils, there might be a million nematodes per square metre. Many roundworms are parasites; those of the family Anisakidae are common in fish; eating raw fish can lead to anisakiasis which, not surprisingly, is common in Japan. In the tropics, other nematodes cause more horrible afflictions, such as elephantiasis and river blindness. 

The annelids are segmented worms; their bodies are divided into many sections, each with copies of all the important organs. There are three classes of annelids: Oligochaeta, the earthworms; Hirudinea, the leeches; and Polychaeta, the marine worms.

There are about 10,000 species of oligochaetes, most living in soil, some in freshwater. Common earthworms, Lumbricus terrestris, are vital to soil quality, because their burrowing carries nutrients such as leaf litter, as well as air and water, from the surface down into the soil; Charles Darwin’s last book was on that subject. The worms that live in your compost bins – you all have compost bins of course – are brandlings, Eisenia fetida.

The longest earthworm in Europe is Lumbricus badensis from the German Black Forest, which grows to 60 centimetres, but the real monsters belong to the family Megascolecidae, e.g. the giant Gippsland earthworm from Australia, which can reach two metres.

Leeches are similar to oligochaetes, except that they have a sucker at both ends, used for locomotion (they move in the same manner as inch worms) or for attachment to a host. There are over 600 species, three-quarters of which are blood-suckers, the rest free-living predators. Fishermen might be familiar with a large leech called Pontobdella muricata, which lives on skates and rays. The medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, has been used for centuries for the spurious cure-all of ‘blood-letting’. Today, doctors use them to reduce swelling and restore circulation after microsurgery, and also to treat varicose veins. When I was doing a frog survey in Malawi, I spent most evenings wading around at the edge of a small lake, and when I got back to my hut and took off my boots, there were often leeches inside, sucking away at my blood.

The last group of annelids are the polychaetes. There are also about 10,000 species, divided into two sub-classes: Sedentaria and Errantia. The lugworm is one of the former. It leads a dull life in a U-shaped burrow in muddy sand, above which, as every shore angler knows, is the cast – that coil of sand that has passed through its digestive system. Other sedentary polychaetes live in tubes made out of mucus and sand or fragments of shell, e.g. the peacock worm and the sand mason worm, both common on the lower shore. The honeycomb worm belongs to this group.

Some sedentary worms make calcareous tubes: Spirorbis, whose tube is coiled like a tiny snail shell, lives attached to rocks and seaweed; Pomatoceros, which makes long, white wiggly tubes, is  often seen on rocks, shells and fishermen’s buoys.

Many tube worms have feathery, fan-like tentacles that can resemble beautiful flowers. The Christmas tree worm, Spirobranchus giganteus, found in tropical seas, has two fans made of several whorls, each looking like an artificial Christmas tree. 

The Errantia contains active, predatory worms. Ragworms, also used as bait by anglers, have “parapodia” or false legs growing out from each segment, with which they crawl or swim. Unlike lugworms, they have tentacles, eyes and, in some species, big sharp jaws. The sea mouse, Aphrodita aculeata, which you might find at extreme low tide, looks more like a drowned mouse than a worm, being short, fat and hairy, but its bristles shine in gorgeous iridescent greens and purples. Another group, the gossamer worms, are specialised for life in the plankton, where they paddle about emitting a yellow bioluminescence at night.

Most annelids are harmless, though there are exceptions. The Mongolian Death worm from the Gobi Desert can kill humans by squirting a deadly poison; just touching this worm is fatal. Fortunately it only exists in the minds of cryptozoologists. But fireworms, found on tropical coral reefs, have bristles which contain a toxin that can cause pain, irritation and nausea. The larger errant polychaetes can give you a nasty bite. One species is especially scary –  the trap-jaw worm. This creature, which can grow to nearly three metres in length, spends its time buried in the sand around Indo-Pacific coral reefs. When it senses a fish nearby, it lunges up out of its burrow, and its huge open jaws snap shut on the surprised fish, which is then dragged down into the sand. A reef fish called Scolopsis affinis has learned how to retaliate by squirting jets of water at the worms.

Zoologists are forever changing the classifications that I learned years ago. Beard worms, for example, once in their own phylum, Pogonophora, are now classified as annelids. The best known of these is Riftia pachyptila, a giant tube worm that can also grow to three metres. It lives around hydrothermal vents deep in the Pacific, part of a community of animals adapted to darkness and temperatures as high as 380 degrees Celsius. Also now placed among the annelids are the sipunculids. I was once very pleased to be able to identify a plateful of these unimpressive worms in a restaurant in Xiamen, China, where they are a local delicacy. They came in a sort of jelly, and like so many odd things the Chinese eat, tasted only of soy sauce, garlic and ginger.

The Chinese are not the only ones who eat worms. The palolo worm, similar to a ragworm, is very important in the South Pacific. Cork-born writer and artist Robert Gibbings, in his book ‘Over the Reefs’, described their capture in Samoa. On just a few nights in October or November, when the moon is in its last quarter, the palolo rise to the surface in great writhing masses and release their reproductive segments, which are the edible bits. They apparently taste better than oysters but smell like the reef at low tide.

To the average person, worms are disgusting, squirmy things, and parasitic worms are so unpleasant that anyone without an understanding of natural selection must surely wonder why they exist at all. Sir David Attenborough (who is 100 years old this month) uses the nematode that causes river blindness to explain his agnosticism – how can a merciful god have created a worm which lives only by burrowing into a child’s eyeball?

But the majority of worms are unobtrusive, some are quite beautiful, and many are important environmental engineers; even the nasty ones have ingenious life-cycles. We should be fascinated by worms, not be disgusted by them.

I often talk to cows; where I live, there isn’t much else to talk to. They can look so miserable, standing in muddy fields, soaked by the pouring rain and battered by the wind. But then, on a sunny day, chewing the cud, they seem quite content. They stare back at me with those great big eyes and inscrutable expressions while I assure them that I’m not a carnivore. But I do drink milk, and life without cheese would be unthinkable, so in a small way, I contribute to their misery. 

What cows don’t ever appear to be is intelligent, so the title of this article must seem an oxymoron (which itself could be a bovine pun). But recently, it has been discovered that one cow has learned to use tools. Veronika, a Brown Swiss living in Austria, uses a broom to scratch her back. She picks up the handle with her mouth and manoeuvres it with her tongue towards wherever needs scratching. She even knows which parts of the brush to use for which jobs – the bristles for a general back scratch, the handle for getting at itches in difficult places underneath.

Many animals can use tools. In 1960, the great Jane Goodall, who died last year, first observed a chimpanzee using a grass stem to collect termites. Chimps can also scoop honey out of wild beehives with thick sticks, and use leaves as spoons. Orangutans construct nests from leaves and branches, use a variety of twigs for food gathering tasks, and know that poking a catfish with a stick will make  the fish jump out of the water where it can be easily grabbed. Elephants break off branches to swat flies and scratch itches, and some dolphins protect their noses with sponges when they are foraging for fish hidden in the sea bed. Egyptian vultures use stones to break ostrich eggs, and New Caledonian crows modify sticks and leaves, just like apes, to get food. Even some invertebrates use tools: the Indo-Pacific veined octopus makes shelters out of discarded coconut shells, bottles or other litter, while the Hawaiian boxer crab faces any threat with a sea anemone in each claw, like a Wild West outlaw with two guns. So perhaps a  brush-wielding cow is not so strange.

Cows are ungulates, i.e. mammals with hooves. There are two types of ungulate: the odd-toed ones in the order Perissodactyla (horses, rhinos and tapirs); and those with an even number of toes in the order Artiodactyla – the camels, pigs, hippos and ruminants. (Some zoologists, controversially,  place whales in the latter order too, but that is another story). There are six families of ruminants, including the deer, the giraffes and the bovids. The bovid family is further divided into three sub-families: antelopes,  goats and sheep, and buffaloes and cattle. 

Ruminants all have four-chambered stomachs. A cow eats grass and swallows it quickly. The grass passes into the first and largest chamber, the rumen, where bacteria and protists start to break it down and produce various nutrients. When the rumen is full, the partly digested grass is regurgitated and chewed; the cow is literally ruminating, perhaps having profound bovine thoughts. When the cud is broken down sufficiently, it is swallowed again, and this time passes into the second chamber, the reticulum, where any alien objects (like plastic) gather. Next, food goes to the omasum, which absorbs water and fatty acids, and finally into the abomasum, where further digestion takes place. 

There are two reasons for all this: firstly, grass is very difficult to digest; and secondly, ruminants are, in the wild, constantly under threat from predators such as lions and tigers, so it is vital to get as much food inside as quickly as possible, then digest it at leisure in a safe place.       

The domestic cow’s closest relatives are the six species of buffalo (five Asian and one African); two species of bison (American and European); and three species of wild cattle – gaur, bentang and yak (which have each been domesticated too). The gaur comes from India and SE Asia; the bentang, which is critically endangered, survives only in a few places in SE Asia and northern Australia; and yaks are the extraordinarily hairy cattle from Tibet and other remote parts of western China. (I tried yak once, about twenty years ago in Yunnan Province, fried with Szechuan peppercorns and pak choi; it was the just about last mammal meat I ever ate). 

There are two more notable bovines: the kouprey and the aurochs. The kouprey, Bos sauveli, is the national animal of Cambodia, not that many people inside or outside Cambodia know this. The concept of a national animal is meaningless anyway (we don’t have one here), especially in Cambodia, because the kouprey is extinct – the Cambodians ate them all. Koupreys once lived in areas of mixed grassland and forest from Thailand to Vietnam. Habitat loss, as well as hunting, contributed to their demise – much of Cambodia’s forests were lost during the Vietnamese War and the insane rule of the Khmer Rouge;  commercial, often illegal, logging since has done even more harm. The last sighting of a live kouprey was in 1983. There are none in captivity; only one was ever kept in a foreign zoo, in Paris; it died during World War Two. The nearest I came to a kouprey was the statue of two bulls in the town of Sen Monoron, in the north-east of Cambodia.

 The aurochs, Bos primigenius, was the ancestor of modern domestic cattle. It was a massive animal, the bulls nearly six feet at the shoulder, and each horn nearly three feet long. It once lived all over Europe, Asia and North Africa, grazing alongside Irish elk, straight-tusked elephants and narrow-nosed rhinoceros. Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens hunted the aurochs, and painted pictures of it, along with other animals, on the walls of their caves. The giant bulls of Greek mythology, symbols of power and sexual potency, were aurochs. But by the end of the 17th century, they had all been exterminated. (The word ‘aurochs’, by the way, is from Old German, and is related to ‘ox’; it can be singular or plural; an alternative plural is ‘aurochsen’.)

Domestication of the aurochs occurred twice: in the Middle East, about 10,000 years ago, this produced our beef and dairy cattle, Bos taurus; and in India, about the same time, gave rise to Bos indicus, the humped cattle or zebu. These were introduced into Africa about 3,000 years ago and hybridised with African aurochs, which resulted in breeds such as the enormously-horned Ankole. 

While cattle here are just agricultural commodities, to the Hindus they are sacred and often lead pampered lives; an estimated five million cows roam freely in Indian cities. Unfortunately, there is little for a cow to eat in a big city, except human rubbish; according to a 2017 article in the Times of India, nearly 1,000 cows die a painful death each year in the city of Lucknow alone, due to feeding on plastic. In a 2021 report in the same newspaper, one cow was found to have 77 kilograms of plastic in its stomach. So much for being sacred.

Cattle kill, on average, twenty-five people every year in the UK and USA, and probably many more worldwide – some are in farmyard accidents, others involve stupid people walking across fields where cows are grazing. In Spain, where bull-fighting (a relic of Roman barbarity) is still considered a sport,  matadors and those idiots running through the streets of Pamplona during the Fiesta de San Fermin, sometimes get gored by the horns of the animals they are tormenting; that seems fair enough to me.

Cattle cause more harm by the production of methane, mostly by eructation resulting from their digestion. Methane makes up 19 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, 21 per cent of it coming from cattle. Certain food additives can limit this, such as rapeseed or seaweed – particularly the red alga Asparagopsis, an invasive species from warm waters. Research in California found feeding a seaweed supplement to grazing beef cattle  cut methane production by nearly 40 per cent. 

I don’t want to upset farmers – theirs is one of the few jobs that is truly essential; they should be appreciated, and paid, much more. But there are an awful lot of domestic cattle on the planet; the current world population is about 1,500,000,000 – one third of all mammalian biomass. That could be reduced. Apart from the methane they produce, such a huge number needs an equally huge amount of grazing land, much of which was once natural habitat for wildlife – whether rainforests in South America, or gorse-covered hillsides in West Cork. Perhaps now, with the knowledge that cows are not stupid, but are capable of deliberate thought and decision making, people might stop eating them.

There was much discussion in the pub last week about the weather, as usual, particularly the flooding in Co. Wexford. Some suggested that pearl mussels and slugs were to blame, a view also expressed in the newspapers by an Enniscorthy  town councillor, though he talked about “pearls and snails”. So I thought it time for a small lesson in malacology – the study of molluscs.

The phylum Mollusca is one of the great divisions of the Animal Kingdom. It is made up of seven classes. Four of these will be unfamiliar to most: Monoplacophora, Polyplacophora (chitons), Aplacophora and Scaphopoda. The other three classes are well-known: Cephalopoda, Gastropoda and Bivalvia. I have written before about cephalopods and gastropods; the former are cuttlefish, squids and octopuses, the most advanced of the molluscs, and indeed, of all invertebrates. Gastropods are the snails and slugs. Bivalves are those molluscs with two shells, such as mussels and clams. A mussel is no more closely related to a slug than a fish is to an elephant.

Bivalves are probably the least charismatic of the molluscs. You can look an octopus in the eye, and recognise a fellow being. You can do much the same with a snail, though they are not so bright. But most bivalves don’t have eyes, or even heads. Cooking bivalves might not engender the same degree of guilt as, say, watching a lobster struggling in a pan of boiling water, and when served up in a shellfish risotto or as moules marinière, it is easy to forget that they were once living animals. But they were.

There are over 9,000 species of bivalves; most are marine, but a few families have species that live in freshwater. I always found their classification rather difficult and sometimes illogical, based as it was upon internal structures such as gills, muscles and hinges, and before writing this, I had to get out my old invertebrate zoology book and see what I had forgotten. Then, knowing that zoologists (and botanists) keep re-naming and re-classifying things, I looked them up on the internet. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have mastered bivalve taxonomy either so, for simplicity, I will divide the bivalves into four categories.

Firstly, there are those with muscular feet, two siphons and two identical shells. These are the cockles and clams. We are all familiar with cockles; they live in shallow sand, are easily collected and good to eat. Clams are more variable, and the word can refer to many quite different types of bivalve. There are thousands of species, from tiny ones less than a centimetre wide, living unnoticed in littoral mud, to the giant clams of the Pacific, the largest of all bivalves, which can reach 120 centimetres in width and weigh 200 kilograms. Clams have always been commercially important: the hard-shelled clam, Mercenaria mercenaria, known as the quahog in America, is the main ingredient in clam chowder, and was one of the species used by indigenous Americans to make wampum – ceremonial beads which later became a currency for trade with the Europeans, hence its Latin name.

My second category is made up of bivalves with reduced feet and siphons and sometimes non-identical shells; they usually live on top of the sediments or anchored to rocks. Many are also commercially important. The common mussel grows on every rocky shore around our coasts; thousands of tons of farmed mussels are exported from Ireland every year. The great scallop has many rudimentary eyes and swims by jet propulsion; it is mostly captured by dredging, which is very destructive. The European flat oyster used to be poor man’s food; now it is an expensive treat. Most bivalves can produce pearls of some sort; the best come from Indo-Pacific pearl oysters.

The third group are the burrowing and boring clams. These have very long siphons and much stronger feet that allow them to borrow deeply into sand, wood or rock. Razor shells are so named because they look rather like old fashioned cut-throat razors; try to catch one and its long, muscular foot will pull it downwards at great speed. Then there are the soft-shelled clams or sand gapers; they are large and meaty, and though common on our beaches, are rarely eaten here, but in America are a main ingredient of the New England clam-bake. Their cousin, the geoduck from the Pacific coast of North America, can live for more than 150 years, and has siphons so long, up to a metre, they cannot be retracted into the shell. 

The related piddocks use their shells as rasps to make holes in rocks in which they live. They still look like bivalves, but the shipworms, Teredo, don’t. These have become so modified for boring, they resemble worms, and their greatly reduced shells are used not for protection, but as tools for chiselling away at timber. Unappealing as they look, shipworms are a delicacy in some south-east Asian countries.

Before the invention of antifouling paints and steel ships, Teredo was a menace that destroyed many large vessels. One famous example was HMS ‘Roebuck’, commanded by the explorer, naturalist and pirate William Dampier. Having written a best-selling book about his first circumnavigation of the world, Dampier was commissioned by William lll in 1699 to explore the east coast of New Holland (now Australia). He surveyed western Australia and parts of New Guinea and collected many specimens new to science, but by then the ‘Roebuck’ was so riddled with shipworm the expedition had to be abandoned and the ship sailed homeward. They got as far as Ascension Island, where she sank. So from the mid-18th century, Royal Navy ships had their bottoms sheathed with copper, which kept the shipworms out.

Back in the 1990s, I had my own experience with Teredo. My old wooden boat developed a serious leak, which was eventually tracked down to three shipworms. Their larvae are microscopic and can get into any tiny crack; perhaps my antifouling was insufficient, perhaps they got in before I bought the boat and the surveyor never noticed. Either way, I had to replace three planks.

The last of my four categories contains exclusively freshwater bivalves with parasitic larvae. They all have very short siphons, so can’t live in deep sediments. In Ireland, we have three species: swan and duck mussels which are found in lakes and ponds, and the pearl mussel, Margaritifera margaritifera, which needs clean, fast flowing rivers.

Most bivalves release eggs and sperm into the water; these mix together to produce planktonic larvae which eventually settle back onto the sea or river bed where they grow into adults. Pearl mussels do it a bit differently. The female’s eggs stay inside her and are only fertilised if she inhales sperm from an upstream male. The larvae, up to four million of them, spend two  months developing in a brood pouch before being expelled. To continue their development, they have to meet a salmon or a trout. Most don’t, and are simply washed away down river and eaten by something. A lucky one will find its way into a salmonid’s gills, using its tiny shells as a sort of clamp. There it stays and grows for about eight months, after which it drops off and sinks to the bottom. If it lands in a muddy area, it will die; it has to settle on a gravelly river bed. There it might live for over 200 years, growing to a length of 15 centimetres, while feeding on organic matter filtered from the water.

M. margaritifera is now endangered or extinct in most of Europe, where it was once exploited for its pearls, though it is still fairly common in Ireland and Scotland. But the alarming thing is that few young pearl mussels have settled and survived since the 1960s – most are killed off by pollution, siltation, the dredging and tidying up of rivers, reduction of salmonid numbers (by pollution and overfishing) and smothering by the invasive and unrelated zebra mussels. A subspecies, M. margaritifera durrovensis, evolved to live in the calcareous waters of the Nore, Barrow and Suir; only about a hundred individuals are still alive, all in the Nore.

Pearl mussels might not look very exciting, but I think any creature that lives so long, has such a precarious life cycle, and actually cleans river water (the opposite of what humans do) deserves to be respected and looked after. If humans are affected by flooding, it is because their ever-increasing populations, mindless materialism and ignorance of the natural world – the real world – are destroying ecosystems and changing climates; and, rather obviously, because they build houses in areas prone to flooding. It is humans that are ruining the lives of pearl mussels (and most wild animals), not the other way around.

Lumpsuckers belong to the family Cyclopteridae, part of the very large order Perciformes. There are 23 species, but only C. lumpus is found in this part of the world; four species live farther north in the Atlantic, the rest in Arctic or cold North Pacific seas. Lumpsuckers are related to the equally ungainly and confusingly named sea snails, two species of which may be found in shallow waters around our coasts.

Lumpsuckers spend much of their time in deep water, down to about 200 metres, where they feed on planktonic organisms such as jellyfish and various small shrimp-like creatures. In the breeding season, spring and early summer, they move close inshore.  The female can grow to a maximum length of 60 cm, and when full of eggs, is an obese, almost ball-shaped fish. Males are much smaller. Colours can vary, but they are usually a dark blue or greeny grey, lighter underneath. In the breeding season, the male develops an orangey-red belly. 

 They were given the chicken-related names because of the care with which they look after their eggs. The female lays up to 200,000 eggs, in rocky crevices above the spring tide low water level. Then she heads off back out to the deep sea, leaving the male alone to stand guard, attached by his sucker to the sea bed so he won’t be washed away. At very low tides, the eggs can be uncovered and some get eaten by seabirds, but the male stays with them, even if gulls peck holes in his back. He presses his nose into the mass of eggs to ensure aeration, he fans them with his fins, and he removes crabs, starfish or other predators, as well as any detritus. He is a very good parent.

Once hatched, the young fish spend their first few months in the surface plankton. You can sometimes find them hiding in clumps of drifting sea weed; they are adorable little things, coloured bright turquoise. At the surface, they are preyed upon by seabirds. As they grow, they descend to deeper water; their remains have been found in the stomachs of anglerfish, halibut, Greenland sharks and sperm whales. A blue shark on my boat once regurgitated a small adult. Seals also eat lumpsuckers and, according to the 19th century Cornish naturalist Jonathan Couch,  know how to rip off the thick skin and eat only the soft flesh.

Lumpsuckers are not very important commercially; at least, they weren’t until recently. In Canada and the Nordic countries, they are fished for their eggs, which, when salted, pasteurised and dyed black or orange make a cheap substitute for caviar. In Sweden, it is common at Easter to have hard boiled eggs covered in mayonnaise and topped off with a dollop of lumpsucker eggs. The flesh of the females is not considered worth eating, but my old Scandinavian cookery book has recipes for ‘inkokt stenbit’ (male lumpsucker cooked in court bouillon); ‘stenbitsaladåb’ (male lumpsucker in aspic) and ‘Skånsk stenbitssoppa’ (male lumpsucker soup from Skåne).  Couch wrote that “the taste is mawkish and unsubstantial, the flesh dissolving in the mouth like mucilage or oil”. However, Man has found another use for the lumpsucker. 

Most fish have external parasites, generally known as sea lice, though they are not lice but  crustaceans, either copepods or isopods. The latter are large – like woodlice; the parasitic copepods are much smaller. Many are host specific, e.g. garfish are mostly parasitised by an animal called Caligus belones; the blue shark by Echthrogaleus coleoptratus. In the wild, fish either put up with the parasites, or they go to special places where they know that cleaner fish, especially species of wrasse or shrimps, will be waiting. Sharks carry their own skin-care specialists with them – remoras, those strange fish related to scad whose dorsal fins have been converted into large suckers. 

Garfish often have many parasitic copepods on their gill covers; very large infestations result in holes bored right through the bone into the gills. It is thought that their habit of leaping out of the water is sometimes an attempt to rid themselves of parasites. In early summer in Sweden, garfish migrate from the North Sea, through the Kattegat into the Baltic, where, in less saline waters, the parasites fall off. Similarly, wild salmon collect ectoparasites at sea, and when they migrate into rivers to spawn, the parasites die. But when large numbers of salmon are kept in cages at sea, the parasites have a wonderful time: they eat the skin, flesh and mucus of the salmon, creating open wounds which can cause stress, the introduction of diseases, death and, of course, loss of profit. So fish farmers have to add chemical delousers to the water to kill the parasites. Unfortunately, such chemicals are probably harmful to other crustaceans, so now cleaner fish are kept in the salmon cages. Most of these cleaners are various species of wrasse, but it has been found that lumpsuckers grow more rapidly than wrasse and survive better in colder waters, so since 2011, they have been bred specially and used in Norwegian and Scottish fish farms. 

Biological control of pests is obviously better than using chemicals, but life for cleaner fish in salmon farms is not much fun. Caged salmon, unlike wild fish, are not always grateful for being cleaned and will eat their cleaners. And while wrasse are natural cleaner fish, lumpsuckers are not; studies have found that not all of them like eating sea lice and many die of starvation. Lumpsuckers in the wild can live up to 14 years; in salmon cages, they rarely last a year. So the poor lumpsuckers are forced into an unnatural existence, starved of their normal prey, sometimes attacked or infected by salmon, not allowed to swim into the shallows to breed, and unable to use their suckers to rest on the seabed. They have been turned into tools, not considered as sentient animals. Here again, nature is made to suffer, like the seabirds and cetaceans deprived of food by the capture of sprats and krill to make fish meal for fish farms. But most people don’t think about such things while they nibble their smoked salmon canapés.   

I got to know lumpsuckers for a different reason. Many years ago, my academic career having stalled (there wasn’t much demand for garfish experts) and my old angling boat rendered illegal and uninsurable by new safety regulations, I taught myself fish taxidermy. I thought that with all the anglers who used to fish from Courtmacsherry, some might like to have their best catches mounted and preserved for posterity. They rarely did. But a friend of mine, a commercial fisherman, used to bring me odd fish to examine; they were already dead, so I thought I might as well make use of them. In four years, I prepared 104 fish, including wrasse, lumpsuckers, trigger fish, gurnards, dragonets and boarfish, as well as many crabs and lobsters that had gone bad. The easiest to work on were lumpsuckers: they have no scales to fly off, their skins are tough and leathery and their skeletons almost totally cartilaginous. And when mounted, grotesque as they were, lumpsuckers proved the most popular. 

But it wasn’t a successful venture, and I barely made enough money to pay for plaster, paints and preservatives, which was just as well – I wasn’t happy trying to earn a living from dead animals.  And that was in the nineties when, so it seemed, the Celtic Tiger was bestowing second homes, third cars and Polish au pairs upon the humblest of villagers (and removing much of Ireland’s traditional amity), while I was still living in a leaking caravan, alone but for a fat cat and dozens of unwanted stuffed fish. That is why I went abroad and became a wandering school teacher. 

With the weather here so frightfully cold, let me take you once again to the tropics. Last autumn, I stayed with a friend in Kenya, in a village beside the Indian Ocean. Long ago, this village was home to powerful Arab slave traders; their descendants still own much of the place. The streets are made of sand, the houses of coral rock with tin or straw roofs. There are seven mosques. A narrow creek winds inwards from the sea between thick woodland. On the village side of the creek, a couple of fishing boats – long, narrow, open boats with outboard motors – rest on a patch of sand. Opposite, there is a mangrove forest, where male fiddler crabs wave their enormously over-sized right claws to defend territory and attract females, and mudskippers (terrestrial fish with bulging eyes) crawl and jump about in the slobby sediments. Beyond that, overlooking the ocean, there are several very fine houses; one used to be owned by Denys Finch Hatton (lover of Karen Blixen, who wrote ‘Out of Africa’). Around the headland is an almost empty beach of white sand and waving coconut palms.  

Low tide exposes what was once a coral reef, now a maze of rock pools filled with sea urchins, brittle stars, cowries, hermit crabs and all sorts of tiny fish. Black-headed herons and woolly-necked storks stride across the coral in search of fish and crabs, while various waders poke about for small invertebrates. At certain times of the year, green turtles haul themselves up the sand to lay their eggs.

The beach is home to many ghost crabs, always busy carrying out maintenance to their burrows. Emerging cautiously from underground, their eyes literally on stalks, they bear armfuls of sand, which they throw out onto the beach. If disturbed, they rush back into their holes, or hurry away, sideways,  across the sand.

Under the water, as far as I dared to snorkel, there were a few small, colourful fish and the odd sea cucumber. The latter belong to the same phylum as starfish and sea urchins, but they are not as attractive. The one I saw rather resembled a length of drisheen; other species look like knobbly cucumbers. They feed by trapping detritus in their cauliflower-like tentacles, which they then push into their mouths one by one, as if they were licking their fingers. For defence, they eject tangles of sticky threads, or in some species, most of their internal organs, at any potential molester. They are in great demand in China, both for culinary and medicinal purposes – they are thought to be beneficial in the treatment of arthritis and certain cancers. But they mature slowly and, living in shallow water, are easily collected and overfished. 

To remedy this, I once had a plan to farm sea cucumbers in Tanzania. However, lacking finance, aquaculture experience and courage, I went to China to teach English instead. There, I discovered that sea cucumbers can cost up to £300 per kilogram. What money I could have made! I tried a cheap variety in a restaurant once; it was chewy and tasted only of its sesame oil and garlic dressing.

One day while snorkelling from that beach I came across a pair of porcupine fish at a cleaning station. Porcupine fish belong to the same order as puffer fish and like them, if attacked, blow themselves up into a ball. They are not as toxic as puffers but, being covered in spikes, are very difficult to swallow. These particular porcupine fish were motionless under an overhanging rock, while several cleaner wrasse – relatives of our own cuckoo and ballan wrasse – went to work removing parasites from their spiny skins. 

There are many species of fish, and shrimps, that act as cleaners. It is an interesting phenomenon. Fish that want to be cleaned go to specific locations where they have learned that there will be cleaners waiting. It is rather like going to the hairdresser. Cleaner wrasse are small with distinctive patterns, usually dark, longitudinal stripes, which the client fish recognise (the ones I saw were bluestreak cleaner wrasse). The client fish is much larger than the cleaner, and could easily swallow it – the cleaners often work inside gills and mouths – but they consider having parasites removed more important than a quick snack. Some other fish mimic cleaners, fooling client fish so they can get close, for protection or to steal food without doing any cleaning. (Fish such as  lumpsuckers and ballan wrasse are used, controversially, in fish farms to remove parasites from caged salmon, but that is another story.)

There were never many humans on the beach, and hardly any tourists. Beyond the reef, fishermen used ring nets to catch wolf herrings and half-beaks. The former are like very long herrings with big sharp teeth. They are good to eat, but terribly bony. Half-beaks are relatives of garfish and flying fish; they have large pectoral fins, and elongated lower jaws, but very short upper jaws. Poorer fishermen, with snorkels and home-made spear guns, hunted for whatever they could catch, which was not much.

A young man was sometimes digging in the sand with his hands, like a dog. He was after the ghost crabs, animals barely two inches across. He told me they made “good relish”. Other men chipped rock oysters off the coral, and searched for anything vaguely edible or saleable. They reminded me of something I’d seen in China: men digging in the sand or looking in rock pools for tiny shellfish or crabs to take home and stir-fry – except that those Chinese men were not poor and hungry. (I see this now in Ireland too, unfortunately).  

It is rare to find a big shell on a Kenyan beach, because of the souvenir trade. In Malindi, a town to the north, I came across a stall selling sea shells, including rare and endangered helmet shells and giant tritons, as well as dried starfish, dried porcupine fish and sharks jaws. Only foolish tourists would buy them, as it is illegal to take such souvenirs out of Kenya; other African countries are not so strict. Please, if you see dried sea creatures and shells for sale on your holidays, do not buy them. 

Something I didn’t see on that beach – very, very unusual in Africa – was rubbish. It was probably cleaner than most beaches in Ireland. My friend and her neighbours who care about the environment pay a team of previously unemployed young men (as a third of all young Kenyans are) to pick up the litter. 

Fishermen in Ireland who think they have a tough time should think again. I used to live in Mombasa, teaching in a school near another beautiful beach. There were once many fishermen living along that coast, but because of ‘development’, they were all forcibly moved to make way for hotels and big villas belonging to wealthy foreigners and politicians. So now those fishermen have to carry their nets from their new homes, in an insalubrious suburb a couple of miles inland, down to their boats on the beach, and in the evening trudge with dripping nets and baskets of fish, if they have any, all the way back. 

In the harbour north of my friend’s home, I saw three large Chinese fishing boats at anchor, part of China’s massive distant water fleet that is plundering African fish stocks (often, it is alleged, illegally). The Chinese even export cheap fish to Kenya, further undermining the Kenyan fishing industry. Meanwhile, they are building new ports in two attractive and historic towns – Lamu to the north, and Bagamoyo (once one of my favourite places), down the coast in Tanzania. Disturbance and pollution from these building projects is ruining inshore fishing (and almost everything else), so local boats have to go farther out to sea, where, of course, there are few fish left to catch.  

It is not just the sea that is threatened. Every morning, I was awakened by the muezzins calling from the seven mosques, the crowing cocks, then the bulbuls and robin chats, kingfishers and ibis. But another sound was the bang, bang, bang of digging machines coming from the nearby quarry. The first time I stayed in that village, there was no quarry, just trees. A new tarred road has been built, so tourists will be able to drive right up to the beach. One day this paradise, like so many others around the world, will be gone.

P.S. The defeat of the bill to ban fox hunting was very disappointing (especially as we have a minister of state for nature who likes animals). As I write this, a hunt is actually taking place in the surrounding fields – our local foxes terrorised by baying hounds and whooping, hollering men, the type for whom cultural evolution ceased in the Middle Ages. It is worrying that so many of similar mind sit in the Dáil.

That was a few weeks ago, in Livingstone, southern Zambia. I had been in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, for my adopted son’s graduation, and was then on my way, by ghastly bus, to Zimbabwe to visit some old friends. Stopping for the night in the town named after the famous explorer, I stayed at a beautiful place not far from Victoria Falls. While I enjoyed my sundowners in the riverside bar, the only sounds were the scary barking of baboons and the chirping of grass frogs, tinkling of reed frogs and the woody creaking of guttural toads. Early next morning, before the bulbuls and robin chats had started off the dawn chorus, the first thing I saw, chomping away at the grass a few yards from my chalet, was a hippopotamus. 

I was last there ten years ago. Nothing much had changed, except the front gates of the lodge had once been surrounded by woodland; now there were just broken tree stumps. And as we drove into town, the culprits, the largest of all land animals, were plodding along one of the main streets. 

Southern Africa was experiencing a severe drought (probably exacerbated by climate change); Victoria Falls was almost completely dry – a great disappointment for any tourists expecting to see one of the world’s most spectacular natural wonders. For wildlife, it was much more serious. Elephants had moved out of nature reserves in Zambia and neighbouring Zimbabwe in search of food and water. This caused confrontations with humans – my taxi driver said that some farmers had recently been killed trying to defend their crops, and an elephant was shot just the day before I arrived. In 2024, 31 people were killed by elephants in Zimbabwe. 

According to the ‘Save the Elephants’ charity, there are about half a million elephants in all of Africa. There were 10 million at the beginning of the 20th century. Until recently, hunting for ivory was the main cause of their decline. A decade ago, ivory was worth up to $2,000 a kilogram in China, and on average, 100 were killed by poachers every day. But ivory sales were banned in China in 2018, and poaching has decreased. The biggest problem for elephants now is lack of space, as the human population increases madly and the continent ‘develops’.

While elephants are classified as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, in Zimbabwe and Botswana, which together have over a quarter of all African elephants, their numbers are considered to be out of control. They can be legally hunted in Zimbabwe – there is a quota of 500 a year. In 2019, thirty young elephants from Hwange National Park were sold to Chinese zoos, which is a terrible fate for any animal. And last year, the Zimbabwean government proposed slaughtering elephants to feed drought-stricken communities. Conservationists in the UK were horrified, prompting Botswana’s wildlife minister to suggest sending 10,000 elephants to Hyde Park in London, so Britons could learn what it was like to live alongside them. 

Attempts have been made to reduce conflicts with humans. In Hwange, sixteen elephants have been fitted with radio collars so they can be tracked. When they are heading towards villages, rangers on bicycles are sent off to warn locals (not that the locals can do much, except shout, wave sticks and bang cooking pots). ‘Save the Elephants’ has taught farmers in Kenya to grow crops that elephants don’t like, such as chillis and sunflowers, and to keep bees – elephants are scared of bees – which also provide the farmers with an extra income. 

In lawless states like the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, elephants are probably doomed, hunted as they are for meat, as well as ivory. The forest elephant, found only in the Congo Basin and parts of west Africa (and considered a separate species since 2000), is critically endangered. In Kenya, which tries to look after its wildlife, there are about 36,000 elephants left, most, but not all, in nature reserves; 12,000 live in Tsavo National Park. 

Tsavo is Kenya’s oldest and largest reserve. There are actually two separate parks, East and West; the railway line from Nairobi to Mombasa runs roughly through the middle. The total area of Tsavo is 22,000 square kilometres, nearly three times the size of County Cork. It was in Tsavo in 1898 that two mane-less male lions terrorised workers constructing the railway. Irish-born Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, the chief engineer of the project, eventually shot the lions, but by then they had devoured 28 Indian workers and unrecorded scores of Africans.  

After leaving Zimbabwe, I flew up to Kenya to visit another old friend who lives in a small seaside village north of Mombasa. Tsavo is three hours away by car, so with my friend’s cook driving and her night watchman for security, I went there for a two-day safari. We saw giraffes, hippos, several species of antelope, a pride of sleepy lions, a cheetah and her cub and a large number of wonderful birds. There were no rhinoceroses (the few surviving rhinos mostly live in guarded reserves within reserves), but dozens of elephants, coloured red from the lateritic soil they roll in and the giant termite mounds they rub against. Many of the elephants in Tsavo were once orphans, their parents killed by poachers. They were cared for by the late, heroic Daphne Sheldrick in her orphanage outside Nairobi until they were big enough to be released back into the wild.

At the camp where we stayed, meals were shared, unexpectedly, with splendid starlings and a very persistent red-billed hornbill. Early one morning there was a fearful commotion: screeching baboons sent a herd of impalas stampeding around the tents. The cause of the disturbance was a cheetah who came in to the camp for a drink. Later, having failed to zip up my tent sufficiently, I returned from breakfast to find a box of biscuits torn to shreds and the contents gone – stolen by vervet monkeys.

Africa is a paradise for animal lovers, and there are still such vast areas of wilderness; it is difficult to imagine it will ever change. But every time I return to Africa, the cities are larger, there are new airports where there was once forest, and roads and railways, built by the Chinese, cutting through national parks. Lusaka, never an attractive city, is now an unplanned monstrosity of horrendous traffic jams, expensive shopping malls, ugly buildings, slums and unbelievable litter. All African cities I’ve been to are much the same. Main roads linking cities are choked up with lines of lorries, and so new roads have to be built. Then there are all the mines and the dams. No thought is given to wildlife, whose territories are increasingly fragmented or destroyed.  

As in most parts of the world, there are animals in Africa that have adapted to life alongside humans. Marabou storks stroll along the streets in Kampala, picking up the rubbish. At the airport bar in Mombasa, vervet monkeys help themselves to packets of crisps when the barmaid isn’t looking. Baboons steal from lorries queuing up at border crossings. The friends with whom I stayed had gardens filled with impressive birds, including wood hoopoes and crested barbets, hadada ibis and huge trumpeter hornbills; in Kenya I was awakened most nights by bushbabies. Even in my Zambian family’s awful neighbourhood, there were bulbuls, robin chats, barn owls and fruit bats. 

Most wild animals, however, prefer to be far away from humans, but as African nations strive, regrettably, to be just like countries in the west, that is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for elephants. One has to sympathise with farmers whose crops are devastated by rampaging pachyderms, but it is not the animals’ fault. There are 550,000 elephants in Africa, living as they have done for millions of years. The population of African humans is 1,500,000,000 and rising. Which one is out of control? 

P.S. I made an inexplicable error in last month’s article. My sister’s donkey, Bess, not only finished third in the 1976 Courtmacsherry Regatta Donkey Derby, she won the race in 1977, and was third again in 1978, two  months after falling down the well. My apologies. 

Donkeys, horses and zebras all belong to the same genus, Equus, the only living members of the horse family, Equidae, which in turn is part of the order Perissodactyla, the odd-toed ungulates; rhinoceroses and tapirs are also in this order. There were once many more species of horse-like creatures, and they left an extensive fossil record, mostly in North America. Horse evolution involved an increase in body size, change in dentition and a reduction in the number of toes. For example,  Eohippus was about 30 centimetres tall at the shoulder, had four toes on its front feet and three on the back. It lived in forests about 50 million years ago, browsing on fruits and leaves. Around 15 million years ago, many woodland habitats gave way to grassy plains, and so a larger proto-horse, Merychippus, evolved for running – its central toe was the biggest, and its other two toes didn’t touch the ground; also, the crowns of its teeth became much longer, for chewing hard grasses. Equus, with its hoof and vestigial toes, first appeared about three million years ago. It migrated to Asia during the last Ice Age when, due to lower sea levels, there was a land bridge between what is now Alaska and Russia. It then became extinct in North America, probably because of early humans, who had travelled the other way.

The domesticated horse is descended from the Eurasian wild horse or tarpan, which once roamed from Russia to Spain, but which became extinct in the late 19th century. Przewalski’s horse was native to the steppes of central Asia, but by the 1960s, it too had disappeared from the wild. However, captive breeding programmes have been successful, and Przewalski’s horses have been re-introduced into Mongolia and western China, as well as Ukraine, where over a hundred of them now graze on (probably radioactive) grass in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. All other apparently wild horses are feral, for example brumbies in Australia and mustangs in America.

There are three zebra species. The plains zebra is the one you are most likely to see on a safari in East Africa, and is still relatively common. The taller Grevy’s zebra, which has thinner stripes and is found only in Ethiopia and parts of Kenya, and the mountain zebra of Namibia and parts of South Africa, are both endangered. The quagga, which was striped only on its front half, the rest of it being brown, was hunted to extinction by 1878.

Finally, there are three species of wild ass: the African, the Asiatic and the Tibetan. All are in danger of extinction. Only 600 African wild asses remain, in the deserts of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia; it is from this animal that our domestic donkey is derived.

Being so closely related, donkeys, horses and zebras can interbreed, though the offspring are not fertile. A mule is a cross between a male donkey and a female horse; a hinny is a cross between a male horse and a female donkey. The general term for a hybrid between a zebra and any other equine is zebroid.

When I first came to Ireland in 1970, donkeys pulling carts of milk churns to the creamery were still a common sight, and many were kept as pets. My sister had two, called Bess and Jenny. She and some friends used to give donkey rides on Courtmacsherry beach in the late 1970s. Bess was old, with a concave back, short legs and an especially lugubrious expression, but she managed to come third in the Donkey Derby at the Courtmacsherry Regatta in 1976. She gained further when, while being led to new pastures behind the village, she disappeared down a deep and long-forgotten well that was grown over with weeds. My poor sister ran down to the harbour where I was working, desperately seeking help. Friends and neighbours all joined in the rescue; the owner of the hotel actually climbed into the hole and got a sling, made of fishing net and rope, around the donkey. With a block and tackle from the lifeboat and a kindly farmer’s tractor, we managed to get Bess almost to the top. Then she slipped out of the sling, back to the bottom and, we assumed, certain death. But we tried again, and this time the donkey’s huge ears and mournful face eventually appeared above the hole, and with one final heave, she was standing on all fours, unscathed and unconcerned.

If well-looked-after, donkeys can live up to 40 years. Where they are overworked and mistreated, their life expectancy is a fraction of that – nine years in Ethiopia. Despite their holy associations (the cross on a donkey’s back is supposedly because Jesus rode one into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, if you believe that sort of thing), they often suffer great cruelty, usually because of ignorance. Donkeys have particular problems with their feet: their hooves do not wear down like other equids, and if not regularly pared (every six-10 weeks), they grow enormously, curling upwards until the foot is permanently damaged and the animal crippled.

I lived for a year in Khartoum, Sudan, teaching in what must have been the worst school in the world. Khartoum is a big modern city, but donkeys are still used as beast of burden, and have a pretty horrible existence. I saw them on building sites, pulling trailers overloaded with bricks, or transporting tanks of water. Every day, a donkey and cart came down our road with two or three ragged boys, collecting rubbish; the donkey was skeletal, the boys vicious.

Donkeys are eaten in many countries, even in Europe. Worldwide, perhaps 10 million donkeys are killed for their meat or skins. The Chinese have their own especially cruel ways with donkeys.

When I lived in Shandong Province, I was told by my students of a donkey restaurant where one points to the particular part of the donkey one wants to eat, and it is cut off the live animal. There are certainly videos available on the internet of donkeys in China being butchered beside the road for any passing donkey eater.

Recently, there has been a great demand for donkey hides. These are made into ejiao, a type of gelatin used by Chinese medical practitioners to treat, among other things, insomnia, dry coughs and bleeding, to improve one’s sex life, and to delay ageing. People pay up to $388 per kilogram for it (more stupidity). As a result, the population of donkeys in China has plummeted, so that greedy nation has turned to Africa for supplies. In Kenya, four government-licensed abattoirs have been slaughtering donkeys for export to China since 2018, but there is such demand for the poor animals that pet and working donkeys are stolen and killed (in the same way pet dogs and cats are stolen in China to supply dog and cat restaurants). Horrific for the donkeys, it is also disastrous for the owners, for whom the donkey might be essential for their work or transport.

The slaughtering of donkeys has now been outlawed in some African countries, but knowing how things work (or don’t) in Africa, and the increasing power and influence of merciless and mercenary China, I don’t know how effective such a ban will be. I have a friend in Kenya who has two rescued donkeys; they now have a luxurious life, but if I were her, I would worry about them.

Some donkeys are lucky, thanks to the Donkey Sanctuary. Set up in England in 1969, this well-deserving charity does great work in giving good homes to old, sick or mistreated donkeys, and has branches throughout Europe. It also has operations in India, Mexico and a few African countries, educating owners and offering free veterinary clinics. The Irish branch is based in Liscarroll, north Co. Cork. To find out more, go to www.donkeysanctuary.ie.

There are alien animals living wild all over the world – hippopotamuses in Colombia, camels in Australia, stoats in New Zealand, Burmese pythons in Florida. There are parakeets in England, slow worms in the Burren and wallabies in the Irish Sea. And now we have hornets in Cork.

There are many reasons for these invasive species, but the worst invader of all, Man, is nearly always responsible. 

We have been moving animals around the world for hundreds of years. Once the Portuguese set off on their voyages of discovery in the 15th century, their ships became cruise liners for rats and assorted invertebrate travellers. The brown rat, native to China, is now found on every continent except Antarctica. The black rat, originally from south-east Asia, was spread throughout Europe by the Romans. It reached Australia with the first convict ships in the late 1780s. Even earlier, the Polynesians in their travels through the South Pacific, brought with them the Polynesian rat. 

There are hundreds of invasive species of animal in Ireland. The Normans introduced rabbits to the British Isles as a source of food. Many other mammals have made themselves at home here since then, such as the sika deer, the bank vole and the white-toothed shrew. The American mink was farmed in Europe for its fur, but many escaped to the wild, competing with European mink and terrorising small mammals and water birds.  

American grey squirrels were brought to Britain in the 1870s by gentry who wanted something exotic in their parks. Grey squirrels have now entirely displaced the smaller native red squirrel from most of England, though in Ireland they are possibly kept under some control by pine martens. Over a hundred red-necked wallabies, natives of eastern Australia, live on Lambay Island, off the coast of north County Dublin, guests of the island’s owner, Lord Revelstoke. Even more wallabies live on the Isle of Man, having escaped from a wildlife park in the 1960s.  

In other parts of the world, invasive species cause much bigger problems. The Colombian hippos, over 200 now, descended from four that were living in a private collection belonging to the drug baron Pablo Escobar. When he was killed by the police in 1993, his menagerie, which also included elephants, giraffes and ostriches, was taken over by the government. But the hippos escaped, reproduced prolifically and are now altering river ecosystems. 

Many invasive species descended from pets that escaped or were set free by really stupid people. When I lived in Saudi Arabia, I was given a pair of budgerigars by a fellow teacher who didn’t know what they were. Going home one summer, I gave them to another teacher to look after; she let them out of her window. They probably didn’t survive, but that is how the rose-ringed parakeets became established in Europe; natives of Africa and India, these small parrots are now found from Turkey to Spain, with the largest population in London. 

Terrapins, especially red-eared sliders, are often released into rivers and lakes by irresponsible owners who get bored with them. Pet snakes escape and slither into places they shouldn’t be, which is why there are now thousands of giant pythons in the Everglades. Someone introduced the slow worm, a legless lizard, into the Burren. And cats, escaped from ships, abandoned on islands or just wanderers from home, are one of the very worst invasive species, slaughtering an enormous number of birds and small mammals.

Other mammals such as goats and pigs were left by whalers and pirates on various islands around the world, as a sort of living larder should they return, always to the detriment of the islands’ flora and fauna. The dodo, a giant flightless pigeon from Mauritius, was first seen by sailors in 1598; by 1662, it was extinct. Hunting and deforestation reduced its numbers, but it was predation of eggs and chicks by invasive pigs and rats that finished it off. Our relatives, the lemurs, found only in Madagascar, are threatened by habitat loss, but also by invasive dogs, cats and rats.

The native wildlife of Australia and New Zealand has suffered badly, because their specialised fauna – marsupials in Australia, unique birds in New Zealand, just didn’t know what to do when faced with strange predators. Rabbits arrived in Australia with the early European settlers, multiplied astronomically, and competed with marsupials for food. Only the horrible virus, myxoma, brought their numbers under control in the 1950s. One-humped camels were imported from British India in the 19th century to be used as pack animals by early explorers; now hundreds of them roam around the Australian outback, and, like the rabbits, have become serious pests. Then came foxes, introduced for sport, and the feral cats, so today 10 per cent of Australia’s 273 native mammals are extinct, and 21 per cent are threatened. 

When humans first arrived in New Zealand, there were about 130 species of land, freshwater and coastal birds, 93 endemic. Many were flightless and nested on the ground, so were easy prey for mammalian immigrants. At least 60 of them are now extinct.  

Man has tried to undo the damage, with the eradication of rats on many islands. He also introduced other animals to kill off pests, only to make things worse. Stoats were brought to New Zealand to eat the invasive rabbits, but they added to the devastation caused by cats and rats. The cane toad, a noxious amphibian from South America, was let loose in Australia in 1935 to devour beetles that were infesting sugar cane plantations, but it was eaten by marsupials, who didn’t know the toads were poisonous.  

These examples are just the big animals that most people have heard of; there are thousands of invasive invertebrates. Some, such as the Chinese mitten crab, zebra mussels and the warty comb jelly travel in the ballast tanks of ships. Australian and New Zealand flatworms, who eat our garden earthworms, stow-away in imported plants. The false widow spider, whose bite can cause very unpleasant symptoms, came to Ireland in 1997 in a box of bananas from the Canary Islands. Which brings us to the hornets. 

In 2004, some Asian hornet queens, hibernating in a consignment of pottery from China,  arrived in France. The man in charge of checking such things obviously didn’t do his job, and now they are established across much of Europe. They reached Ireland this summer and, as I write this, two nests have been found, with 24 verified sightings, mostly in the Cork area, one in Dublin. 

Hornets belong to the family Vespidae, the true wasps. Along with the sawflies, ants, bees, and  a great many other kinds of wasp, they are part of the order Hymenoptera, one of the largest insect orders, with 150,000 described species. The familiar true wasps in Ireland, all in the genus Vespula (and only distinguishable by examination of the markings on the head), are social insects, living in paper nests they make out of wood scrapings and saliva. 

There are 22 species of hornet. The European hornet, Vespa crabro, is found occasionally in the south of England and sometimes over here, but it is Vespa velutina, the smaller Asian, or yellow-legged hornet, from south-east Asia that is now in the news. It is an attractive insect, with an orange face, black thorax, brown and yellow abdomen and yellow legs. They can give a powerful sting – several people have died in France from stings by this species – but like most animals, if left alone, they won’t hurt you. 

Unfortunately, Asian hornets eat honey bees. They grab bees travelling in and out of their hives, cut off the heads and wings and take the bodies back to their nest to feed their young. In its native habitat, this hornet feeds on the eastern honeybee, but that species knows how to defend itself – they have learned to increase speed when a hornet is hovering near a hive, and they have an interesting strategy for dealing with problem hornets. A number of guard bees form a ball around the hornet, and by vibrating their wings together, produce so much heat, the hornet dies. It probably took millions of years for them to perfect such behaviour. Unfortunately, our honey bees don’t have that much time. 

Biological control is one option – a native parasitic fly called Conos vesicularis has been shown in France to attack the Asian hornet. In Korea, people eat the hornets’ larvae, but I don’t suppose that will catch on here. 

Whatever you do, don’t start swatting yellow and black insects indiscriminately; you might kill hoverflies, which are harmless and important pollinators, or common wasps, which although annoying, are really important in keeping down the pests in your garden. If you think you have found an Asian hornet, take a photograph and send it to the National Biodiversity Centre:

The American zoologist Roger Payne died in June this year. He was the first person to study the sounds made by humpback whales. In 1967, in Bermuda, he met an engineer working for the US navy using underwater microphones to listen for Russian submarines; sometimes other, very peculiar noises were heard. Payne identified the noises – they were made by humpbacks, and they were not just random grunts and screams, but complex songs, with repeated phrases. He released an album, ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale’, which became the most popular nature recording of all time. You must listen to it. The sounds are incredibly strange and very varied; sometimes like the rumblings of an elephant, then the ghoulish wail of a great northern diver, the creaking of an old sailing ship, a buzzing chainsaw, a screeching violin. They often seem to be cries of pain or sorrow. 

The Scottish – Australian folk singer Eric Bogle (he wrote the ‘Green Fields of France’ and ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, among many others) was so moved by these whale songs, he composed his own ‘Song of the Whale’, which begins with the line: “The saddest song I have ever heard, is the song of the humpback whale.” It goes on to describe the tragedy of the whale: “… he sighs and blows as if he knows, his race is nearly run, and soon like all of his kind he’ll fall, before the whaler’s gun”. 

Dr. Payne found that humpback whale songs use similar rules to human musical composition – a  sonata form. These must be exceedingly intelligent, even thoughtful beings. Yet for centuries, humans – some driven by religious belief that the whale was put on earth for man to use, most too ignorant to consider the whale as anything more than a big fish – chased them, speared them, and eventually used exploding harpoons to blast their lives apart. Imagine how a whale must have felt as it was pursued by a whaling ship, and think of the grief the surviving family members suffered? 

So Dr. Payne devoted the rest of his life to whale conservation, and his recording of their songs did much to make people think differently about whales. Greenpeace and its anti-whaling campaign eventually forced governments to ban commercial whaling and, thankfully, the humpback whale doesn’t have to worry about the whaler’s gun anymore. It has actually recovered well. By the time the slaughter ended in 1986, only about 5,000 humpbacks remained in the whole world; now there are thought to be 135,000. But others of his kind – minke whales particularly – are still hunted, “not for need, but for wanton greed”, as Bogle wrote, largely under the pretence of scientific research, while more, especially pilot whales and some dolphin species, are the victims of unnecessary massacres in Japan and the Faroe Islands. 

The great whales do have sad expressions, unlike their permanently smiling dolphin cousins, because their mouths bend downwards – enormously so in the case of the bowhead whale – to accommodate the baleen plates used to filter plankton and small fish from the water. And I always feel sorry for them, living what, to a terrestrial creature, seems such a precarious existence. They can never really relax because they have to come to the surface to breathe (when they do sleep, half of their brain remains awake). If they get sick, they know they must move to shallow water or they might not have the strength to reach the surface. If something goes wrong, down in the dark depths of the ocean, they are doomed. There is a picture in my whale book of a sperm whale entangled in a submarine cable, over 3,000 feet below the surface. What a terrible death that animal must have had.

But until Man came along, whales had been living happily this way for more than 30 million years, ever since their four-legged ancestors moved into the sea permanently (those who doubt biological evolution might like to ponder on the back legs that many whales still possess, embedded in their blubber). And the songs the humpbacks sing are not sad. They are made by the males, singing to potential mates – the longer and more intricate the song, the fitter is the male in the eyes, or rather, ears, of the females. They are love songs.

I wrote about whales a year ago after seeing my first humpback, from the shore beside the Seven Heads. Last week, I saw another. I was most fortunate to be on a whale-watching boat, the ‘Lady Catherine’ (Atlantic Whale and Wildlife Tours), south of Courtmacsherry Bay. It was a wonderful experience, seeing the animal’s spout, the dark body and the pale shadows of its exceptionally long flippers, the dorsal fin, the arch of the back and the flukes of the great tail as it sounded. It was bubble feeding, diving below a shoal of small fish (sand-eels or sprats), blowing huge bubbles to corral them into a ball, then opening its cavernous mouth, stretching the pleats on its throat to increase capacity, before rushing upwards and swallowing the lot. All around him, kittiwakes fluttered and squawked as they picked up fish that fell from his mouth. 

Even better was the fact that we knew who this whale was. It was a male called Boomerang. If you have looked at the model whale tail in Clonakilty, beside the Distillery, you should have read about him. He was first sighted off the Cork coast in 2001 and has been returning regularly ever since. We know this because he has a damaged dorsal fin, thought to be the result of an encounter with a shark or orca while he was in the breeding grounds off the Cape Verde Islands.  

Ireland might now be a whale sanctuary, and Boomerang and his relations no longer have to fear the whaling ships, but many dangers remain. Noise from shipping, naval operations, undersea mining and the construction of wind turbines must all upset whales’ communications. On July 27  this year, a True’s beaked whale and its calf were stranded on a beach in Co. Mayo. They both died. This species, a rarely seen, deep-water animal, has stranded here before. But the same week, two Sowerby’s beaked whales came ashore in the Netherlands, and four bottle-nosed whales ran aground in the Orkneys. The Irish Whale and Dolphin Group fear this might be the result of some underwater human activity causing them acoustic trauma. 

I wrote before of the rubbish in the sea that these whales, and other marine creatures, ingest every day, often resulting in their deaths. Just as worrying is the accumulation of toxic pollutants (industrial chemicals such as heavy metals and PCBs leaked or dumped from ships or factories) in the blubber of cetaceans, leading to all sorts of severe health problems. Then there is global warming, which will cause changes in the distribution of their prey (krill and fish), and overfishing, which will remove it completely.

Thousands of porpoises and dolphins die in fishing nets every year, even here in Ireland. But in other parts of the world, things are much worse. In the Sea of Cortez, Mexico, the smallest species of porpoise, the vaquita, is on the verge of extinction; only about ten individuals remain. They get entangled in nets used to catch totoaba, a fish that is now also endangered because of ridiculous Chinese medicine – its swim bladder is supposedly a cure for fertility problems. The totoaba only became valuable after a related fish in China was over-fished. 

Another small cetacean, the Yangtze River dolphin, was declared extinct in 2006. Life in China’s longest river had become impossible for the little white dolphin, for all the same reasons its oceanic relatives are suffering: it was hunted, starved, poisoned, drowned in fishing nets, and hit and deafened by ships, until none were left. 

I have been observing cetaceans since I was a boy working on my father’s angling boats in the 1970s. Nowadays, more people like to watch whales and dolphins than catch sharks, which is great. The whales we see here are mostly travellers, passing between feeding grounds in the Arctic and breeding grounds in warm waters near Africa, so sightings are irregular. But every glimpse of a whale is special, and anyone who gets to see one is always impressed by their size and strangeness. I hope whale-watchers will reflect on how terribly we have treated these mighty animals, and think about the dangers they still face. Because unless mankind changes his ways, the day will come when the whale’s song really will be sad, as the last one will be singing to himself.

There is an enormous ruin a couple of miles outside Bandon, on the Timoleague road. Drivers not speeding or using their phones can’t fail to see it! This was the old Allman cotton mill. When the cotton business failed in 1826, James C. Allman turned to making whiskey. Allman’s was once the country’s second largest drinks company after Guinness, but it closed in 1929 (partly due to that unspeakable 18th amendment to the US constitution – Prohibition).

One of James Allman’s sons was the biologist George Allman. He graduated in medicine at Trinity, where he became professor of botany, after which he was appointed professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University. Allman’s zoological interests were primarily hydrozoans and bryozoans – tiny marine creatures of which most people have never heard – but he was also the first to name, in 1843, the Kerry slug, Geomalacus maculosus. He described it as “a very beautiful animal, measuring, when creeping, about two inches in length; the colour of the shield and upper part of the body is black, elegantly spotted with yellow…”  

This slug is found only in parts of West Cork, Kerry, Galway and the north-west corner of the Iberian peninsula, a peculiar distribution due either to the Ice Age or as a result of early travellers from the continent bringing the slug accidentally here by boat. It lives in oak woods, blanket bogs and lake shores, and feeds especially on lichens, liverworts and mosses. Being rare and attractive, and not a garden pest, it is protected by law. 

Dublin University Zoological Society once had a field trip to Killarney, ostensibly to search for this slug. We never found one, not because of the animal’s scarcity, but rather due to undergraduates’ priorities when released from the lecture theatre. 

I thought about this the other evening while watching a large black slug making its way towards my sister’s newly planted marigolds. Left to themselves, slugs would devastate the garden.

Looking at a slug, it is hard to think that it is related to the intelligent, charismatic octopus. But they both belong to the Phylum Mollusca – animals with muscular feet and, usually, shells. This phylum consists of eight classes; the average person is familiar with only three: the bivalves (clams and mussels); the gastropods (snails and slugs); and cephalopods (octopuses and squids). 

Gastropods are the most successful molluscs in terms of numbers – there are at least 80,000 species, second only to the insects. The word gastropod means ‘stomach foot’; they are so-called because their foot, the long part on which they crawl, is directly below their stomach. The classification of gastropods has changed considerably since I was at university and is now too complicated to describe here. Put terribly simply, there are sea snails, sea slugs, and terrestrial and freshwater snails, some of which don’t have shells. 

The sea snails, such as periwinkles and whelks, all have gills and most (except for limpets) have coiled shells, which they close with little doors called opercula. The sea slugs have external gills and their shells are greatly reduced or absent; many are large and beautiful, their bright colours a warning to predators that they are toxic. The terrestrial and freshwater gastropods have lungs, of a sort; some have shells without opercula and live either on land (e.g. the garden snails) or in freshwater (the pond snails); in others, the shell is reduced or absent – the semi-slugs and slugs. 

There are about a hundred species of land gastropods in Ireland, in 31 families, mostly small and difficult to identify. The only ones that are large and of interest to the gardener or amateur naturalist belong to the families Helicidae, Arionidae and Limacidae. These all have two pairs of tentacles – the long upper ones with eyes, the smaller pair for taste and touch. 

The Helicidae contains mostly large snails. Six species have been recorded in Ireland. Two resemble the common garden snail, but live in woodland or open rocky places and will not bother the gardener. The very pretty lemon snail, Cepaea nemoralis, and its close relative the white-lipped snail, C. hortensis, are likewise no threat to your vegetables; the former, usually bright yellow with black stripes, is plentiful around the cliffs of the Seven Heads, but, regrettably, has the habit of hiding in places where it is likely to be trodden on. An invasive species, the Italian snail, white with brown spiral markings, is a serious pest in many parts of the world.

Then of course, there is Cornu aspersum (formerly Helix aspersa), the garden snail, which even the dimmest zoophobe could identify. Although they do serious damage in the garden, these snails are handsome and fascinating to watch; they make interesting pets (as children, we used to race them), and are bred for their meat (‘escargot’) and eggs, which are similar to caviar. 

One garden snail became a celebrity in 2016. My namesake, Jeremy, was unusual in having a shell that coiled from left to right, instead of the other way around (he was actually named after left-wing British politician Jeremy Corbyn). Snails and slugs are hermaphrodites, i.e. they have both male and female reproductive organs, but they usually copulate. For snails, the mate must have a shell that coils the same way, otherwise their reproductive parts can’t come into contact. So Jeremy was sadly celibate, until researchers at the University of Nottingham launched an appeal to find him a partner, and he eventually fathered (and mothered) 56 babies.

The family Arionidae contains the round-back slugs. There are 14 species of them in Ireland, including the Kerry slug. The rest belong to the genus Arion and are not so easy to identify. The black slug, the red slug and the invasive Spanish slug are all big, impressive animals, and when disturbed, they roll into a ball. But their colours vary and they can interbreed, so only dissection by an expert can confirm the species. 

Limacidae are the keel-back slugs, which have a distinctive ridge on the back. Some of these are large too, such as the ash-grey slug, Limax cinereoniger, and the attractive leopard slug, L. maximus, (which is striped and spotted), while others are unremarkable grey or brown species, the type that turn up in a salad if you don’t wash the lettuce sufficiently. 

Slugs are not all bad; they might eat your vegetables, but they also feed on fungi, animal faeces and carrion (including their own relatives squashed on the road) and so they recycle nutrients. Some eat other slugs. They  are not greatly esteemed as food by humans – their slime and unpleasant taste compensate for the lack of shell, and many harbour roundworms – though the banana slug was once eaten by native Americans. In Sweden in the days of the horse-drawn cart, slugs were used as axle grease – carters would always carry a pot of slugs, and if the axle started squeaking, shove a few unfortunate molluscs, live, between wheel and axle.

I like slugs and snails; if I see a slug on the road, I will pick it up and put it in a safe place, or it will inevitably be destroyed by a car or tractor. But to the gardener, they are the arch-enemy, and slug pellets are a favourite weapon. Those containing metaldehyde are most effective, because they interfere with the slugs’ production of mucus, without which they can’t move efficiently and become dehydrated. Unfortunately, metaldehyde is also toxic to birds and mammals, including hedgehogs, dogs and cats, so it has been banned in the UK, but is still available here. More acceptable molluscicides contain iron phosphate, which isn’t so harmful to non-molluscs. 

There are safer methods. Give your slugs a saucer of beer, or something else to eat, like flour or old potatoes, and they will be too drunk or full to attack your vegetables. If you leave parts of your garden wild, you will always have beetles, birds and hedgehogs which all eat slugs. Unfortunately, slugs and snails like wild spaces too. My sister, an excellent horticulturalist, goes out into the garden every night with a torch, and removes each slug and snail from her flowers and vegetables. Small ones end up in the chickens’ feed, the big ones are thrown over the stone wall into the field next door for the fox to eat. 

But if you think you have problems with slugs and snails, imagine what it is like for gardeners in the tropics. There are snails in Africa with shells 15 centimetres long. I had a small garden in Zambia where I attempted to grow tomatoes, rocket and various herbs. The snails ate everything.

One humble little fish has recently been in the news. The formation of a group called  ‘Save Our Sprat’, to stop the indiscriminate fishing for sprat in Bantry Bay, was reported in this paper in May. Without sprats, there will be no puffins, no guillemots, no mackerel, no dolphins, no whales. Actually, there have been warnings from environmental groups and marine tourism operators about unregulated sprat fishing for many years. But will the government do anything?  

The European sprat, Sprattus sprattus, is one of five species of true sprat (the others are all found in the southern hemisphere). They belong to the order Clupeiformes – the herring-like fish. The young live in estuaries and shallow bays, the adults down to a depth of 50 metres or more. They feed on zooplankton (all the tiny animals that float in the sea), and grow to a maximum of 12 cm. Five similar fish from this order are also found in European waters: the Atlantic herring, the pilchard (or sardine), the twaite shad, the allis shad and the anchovy. 

Worldwide, there are hundreds of species in the order Clupeiformes, most of them important food fish. In South America, for example, the Peruvian anchoveta is the most heavily exploited fish in the world – over eight million tonnes landed in 2021. In the great lakes of central Africa, clupeiform fish are a major source of protein for millions of poor people. The Tanganyika sprat and Tanganyika sardine (both called kapenta by the locals) are caught at night by fishermen in canoes or small boats, using lights to attract the fish to their nets, which are sometimes nothing more than mosquito nets tied together. The sight of hundreds of lights from these boats, sparkling on a calm black lake, is quite magical. The fish are landed in the early morning and dried in the sun. Their pungent fragrance is an inescapable part of any African market; a friend of mine in Zambia always banished his maid to the garden, with frying pan and brazier, every time she attempted to cook kapenta for lunch.

I was once on an old steamer, the ‘Liemba’, travelling from Kigoma in Tanzania, down Lake Tanganyika, to Mpulungu, Zambia’s only port. On the foredeck, among the jumble of people, luggage, sheets of corrugated iron, timber, drums of cooking oil, crates of beer, bicycles and stacks of bananas, there were mounds of pineapples. But as we travelled south, stopping offshore from little villages of mud huts, small boats would motor or paddle out with new passengers and sacks of kapenta, and take away departing travellers and pineapples. So after three days, the ship no longer smelled sweetly fragrant, but very fishy. 

In Europe, the most important fish in this order was always the herring. In the days before refrigeration, herrings were salted, then heavily smoked until they were dry and coloured red. These preserved fish, called red herrings, could survive for weeks without going bad. Their smell was so strong, they were used to teach hunting dogs how to follow a scent. “Red herring” was first used as a literary device by the English writer and politician William Cobbett who, in an article he wrote during the Napoleonic Wars, compared the London press to a pack of hounds confused by a false trail of red herrings, something he did as a child. (I should get some for next winter’s hunting season). 

Nowadays, fish are smoked for flavour, not preservation. Kippers are herrings that have been split, lightly salted and smoked. Bloaters are ungutted cold smoked herrings; buckling are gutted and hot smoked. Raw herring fillets with onion are a Dutch speciality, while in Sweden there are dozens of varieties of pickled herrings, flavoured, for example, with dill, mustard or curry sauce. 

Sweden is also responsible for one of the most disgusting types of preserved fish – surströmming. It is made from the Baltic herring, a small sub-species very similar to a sprat. These are lightly salted and left to ferment for at least six months. Then they are canned, while still bubbling away, so when you eventually buy a tin, it is bulging. Plunge your can opener into it, and you will be met with a most horrendous stink – just like the “rubby-dubby” (rotten mackerel) used by anglers to attract sharks. 

Pilchards, of course, are important commercial fish too. There used to be a major fishery for them in West Cork up to the early 18th century. Their oil was extracted in buildings called pilchard palaces; there were several in Courtmacsherry. In Cornwall, shoals of pilchards were once so vast, they could be seen from shore, but by the 1960s, the few remaining pilchard luggers were mostly used for angling. Pilchards are still caught there today, though marketed as Cornish sardines. 

Of the other herring relatives in northern Europe, anchovies are only seen in tins, while shad are not prime eating fish. Sprat are good to eat, though they are often marketed under different names. In Britain, they are part of what is called “whitebait”, which can be many different types of small fish, usually deep-fried. Sprats that have been lightly smoked and canned are called brislings. In Ireland, they are mostly ground up into fish meal, although one company from Killybegs does sell cans of “wild Irish sardines” which, according to the ingredients, are sprats. One of Sweden’s much more palatable national dishes is Jansson’s Frestelse, a gratin of potato strips, onions, cream and what they call ansjovis, but which are actually spiced sprats. 

In January and February of 1995, huge shoals of sprat came right into Courtmacsherry Harbour, attracting flocks of kittiwakes, herring gulls and black-headed gulls. People caught them with small nets from the pier. I examined some of those fish – most were ready to spawn. Sprat are serial spawners, i.e. their spawning season can last for several months. A study of sprat eggs on the south coast in the 1980s showed that they first spawned close inshore on the Cork coast in mid-February, but gradually moved offshore, so that by July, most of the eggs were far off the Waterford coast. This makes it imperative that fishermen know when the fish are spawning and when they should not be caught. 

Fish such as herring, mackerel and cod once lived in such enormous shoals that overfishing seemed inconceivable. But many fisheries around the world have crashed, e.g. herring in the Irish Sea in the 1980s, mackerel off Cornwall in the same decade, cod off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in the early 90s. With strict regulations, however, exhausted fisheries can recover. 

Sprat populations always fluctuate, due to variations in water temperature and food availability. There are good and bad years. Fluctuations in the Mediterranean sprat population are thought to be related to increased numbers of an invasive species of ctenophore, Mnemiopsis leidyi, due to a rise in sea water temperature. This animal, which resembles a little jellyfish, but without the stinging cells, eats zooplankton, including sprat eggs. Ctenophores, or comb jellies, which are rarely more than a couple of centimetres in diameter, have rows of cilia, like combs, with which they move; light reflected from these beating cilia produce waves of rainbow colours, especially impressive at night. There are several species in our waters, all predatory. Mnemiopsis leidyi arrived in the Black Sea in the 1980s in the ballast tank of a ship from America, and has since spread throughout the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic.

Whatever the cause of the sprat decline, fishing by large trawlers in inshore waters is going to deplete already struggling populations. It is also unfair on local fishermen with small boats, as well as whale-watchers. I know many fishermen; some of my best friends are fishermen. They have a tough life. Perhaps some are greedy, perhaps some have no choice, but I wonder do any of them think how totally wrong it is to be catching sprats, depriving other sea creatures of a vital food source, just to have them ground up and fed to salmon, pigs and chickens?

Back in 1970, my father was one of the founders of the Courtmacsherry Sea Angling Centre. I am ashamed now to think of all the blue sharks pulled out of the water just for fun, clubbed to death and brought ashore to be weighed and photographed. But what sad pictures – those magnificent animals, their beautiful blue backs turning grey, their entrails hanging out, blood and slime dripping onto the pier. And next day, piles of them in the dock, covered in feasting crabs.

In those days, people didn’t worry about conservation, or cruelty to fish, but my father did think it a waste of food. So he sent me and my sister, then aged twelve and ten, from door to door in the village with a bucket of shark steaks. They looked very appetising: round, white cutlets with just a central cartilaginous spine. But no one was interested in trying them, mostly because of the sharks’ fearful reputation. Also, fresh shark meat has an unpleasant smell, due to their method of osmoregulation.

Osmosis, as you will remember from school, is the movement of water from areas of low solute concentration, across a semi-permeable membrane, to areas of high solute concentration. Fresh-water fish, more concentrated than the surrounding water, are constantly being flooded, and without very efficient kidneys which excrete copious amounts of dilute urine, their cells would expand and burst. Saltwater fish, conversely, are in danger of dehydration – their body tissues are less concentrated than sea water, so they lose water all the time. They have to keep drinking water and excrete excess salt. 

Nearly all sharks are marine, but instead of drinking sea water, they maintain an osmotic balance  (i.e. they keep their cells as salty as the sea) by retaining urea in their blood, not excreting it. After death, the urea breaks down into ammonia, among other things, which explains the pungent odour. 

The Greenland shark, a gigantic fish that can live for up to 400 years, has a particularly high urea content and is poisonous to eat fresh. But in Iceland its flesh, buried for three months then dried, is called hákarl, and is the country’s most infamous dish (considered by many to be revolting).

We found that after a few days in the freezer, the ammonia had dissipated and the shark steaks were perfectly good to eat. But we never really enjoyed them.

Thankfully, in Ireland anyway, sharks are not killed for sport anymore. In 1974, the Inland Fisheries Trust started a tagging programme, and from then on, most sharks caught by anglers were tagged and released. That produced interesting results: for example, nearly all the blue sharks caught in Irish waters are female; on the other side of the Atlantic, they are nearly all male. They meet up in the middle of the ocean. 

Many tagged sharks were recaptured by anglers, but by the 1990s, most were being caught by commercial fishermen, particularly off the Azores. These fish would have had their fins sliced off (for sale to China) then been thrown back alive but unable to swim, condemned to sink to the bottom and die horribly. As a result of this, between 1986 and 2000, blue shark populations in the North Atlantic declined by over 60 per cent. Sharks are especially vulnerable to overfishing because they grow slowly and have few young; worldwide, many species are in serious trouble.

Sharks belong to the class Chondrichthyes – fish with simple skeletons made of cartilage, not bone. This class is divided into two: the elasmobranchs (sharks, skates and rays) and the holocephalans (the chimaeras). There are over 500 species of sharks in the world, ranging in size from the 20 centimetre dwarf lantern shark, to the whale shark, which can grow to 18 metres. About nine species of sharks live in, or regularly visit, Irish coastal waters: basking, blue, porbeagle, tope, lesser and greater spotted dogfish, starry smooth hound, spurdog and the now critically endangered angel shark. There are a few records of common thresher and short-finned mako sharks, while many other species are found in deeper water.

Nearly all sharks are predators with very sharp teeth, so even small ones can give a serious bite (I have the scars to prove it). But only a few species are definitely man-eaters: the great white, the tiger, the bull, and the oceanic white-tipped shark, which was probably the species responsible for eating hundreds of sailors from the torpedoed USS ‘Indianapolis’ in 1945 (a story recounted by Quint in the film Jaws). 

Three of the largest sharks are harmless and eat only plankton. The beautiful whale shark, the largest of all fish, is found only in the tropics; the ugly megamouth, which was not discovered until 1976, lives in deep water. But the basking shark, the second largest fish, is a common visitor to our shores.

In late spring and early summer, increased temperatures in coastal waters produce plankton blooms, which bring the basking sharks in from the deep sea, where they spend the winters. The basking shark’s Latin name is Cetorhinus maximus: ‘ketos’ is the Greek for monster (‘cetacean’ has the same origin); ‘rhinus’ means nose. So the basking shark can be called “greatest monster nose”. They swim through clouds of plankton with their cavernous mouths wide open, and often their great big noses stick out above the water. Tiny planktonic animals, and any other things in the water, get trapped by gill rakers on the inside of their gill arches and are swallowed. The water, carrying oxygen, flows over the gills and out of their gill slits.

Basking sharks were once hunted in Ireland, most famously from Achill Island. They were killed for their meat, their leather-like skin and, most especially, for their oil, which was used for lighting lamps. Sharks have enormous oily livers which help with their buoyancy (unlike most fish, they have no swim bladders). The liver of a basking shark can make up a quarter of its total weight. Fortunately, that fishery ended in the 1960s. 

Basking sharks were often entangled in salmon drift nets; that danger is gone too, and since 2022 they have been protected by law in Irish waters. But in the rest of the world they are still endangered. Their huge fins make a lot of soup, their cartilage is used for spurious Chinese medicine, and they suffer badly because of all the rubbish dumped in the sea.

Over six million tons of fishing gear is lost each year, entangling and killing millions of sharks of many species, as well as whales, dolphins, turtles and birds. Some of that loss is unavoidable, but much is not – I was recently sent photographs of short lengths of rope that have been appearing in unusually large amounts on beaches in West Cork, allegedly discarded by careless mussel farmers. 

Then there is all the plastic – an estimated 14 million tons – dumped into the sea every year. A study in the Mediterranean calculated that basking sharks there were swallowing 540 pieces of plastic per hour. This will result in malnourishment, blockage or serious injury. Whale sharks in Japan and Thailand have died from internal damage caused by ingesting plastic. And plastics can contain toxins that leach out into the shark’s tissues, which might already be poisoned by heavy metals. 

Last May, there were hundreds of basking sharks in Courtmacsherry Bay, easily sighted from the land. One day, I spotted three, close inside Broadstrand. I pointed them out to a holidaymaker staring at his phone; he hadn’t seen them. On the other side of the strand, several people were swimming. They didn’t see them either. Twenty-foot monsters with tall black fins cutting through the water close to shore, unnoticed. Is it any wonder nature is in trouble?

 I should have shouted “Shark!” They would have noticed them then.