I once received a postcard from a friend in Greece which showed a fisherman bashing an octopus against a pier wall. Jane Grigson wrote, in her excellent ‘Fish Cookery’, that fishermen in the Mediterranean insist an octopus has to be beaten 99 times before it is fit for the pot. I […]
Animals often have misleading names: a white rhinoceros isn’t white, a black kite isn’t black. The common gull isn’t particularly common and the bald eagle certainly isn’t bald. A bream can be either a freshwater fish in the carp family or a member of two different families of sea fish; […]
Last month, in the article about marine plastic pollution, I mentioned animals called salps. Not everyone will know what a salp is. They belong to the Tunicata, a division of the Phylum Chordata – animals with spinal cords, which includes all the vertebrates, and us. The most familiar of the […]