Selective+DD

A Selective Advantage Devika Dadhe

This article is about fish and fishing in detail. McPhee starts by writing about the Connecticut river and the Holyoke Dam. He then proceeds to introduce us to shads, a type of fish. He interviews Boyd Kynard, who wanted to be a biologist ever since he was in the eighth grade and now studies behavior of the shads and the stripers. After Kynard is introduced, the article gets very interesting. Kynard explains how the shads have behavior, thoughts. How anything from a shadow to an upcoming strom confuses them and sends them into a frenzy. He explains how they avoid excess sunlight and his hypothesis of why they go through the brutal effots of swimming upstream to lay eggs. He's a fascinating man who studied the shads' behavior at night through infrared. Only a man with true passion for his subject or too much time on his hands is capable of doing that. What was fascinating, however, was how Kynard knew what the fish 'thought' but not what the fish ate. McPhee then goes into details about Kynard's office and their experiments to study more about these lost, confused and a little soft in the head fish. He ends the article talking about the Kosovo war, and that's where he lost me.