Have you ever looked closely at the head of a flatfish? Probably not, unless you are a fisherman or fishmonger. In Ireland, we generally like our fish beheaded; for many people, a fish is just a white fillet, or, in the words of the late, inimitable Keith Floyd, ‘an unidentified […]

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 […]