... fish heads in your front yard. E, like her sisters before her, learned about pulling otoliths. In fact, follow me down memory lane for a moment...The first time I met M's wonderful Dad, my future father-in-law, I had gone over to M's house to help pull otoliths from bass heads. You know, back in the day when I was also a fishy scientist and I had no plans of ever getting married. I had a career. That day I also had the pleasure of sitting side-by-side with L on the front steps of the old little house and having a lovely conversation about how pretty and long L's hair was while she recorded data for us.
Fast forward a few years to our old house that still had the gazebo in the backyard. A and her dad pulled tiny little otoliths from kokanee heads. By this time, A was quite accomplished in the fishy sciences. I was making pizza for dinner and had gone down to the backyard to ask if they wanted Canadian bacon on their pizza, but when I got back to the kitchen, the dog had eaten it all!What? You don't know? What the heck is an otolith?
An otolith is a bone found in the inner ear of a fish. As the fish ages, rings similar to the rings in a tree trunk are formed. These wonderful little bones can only be accessed by cutting through the fish's head, digging around in the brain with a pair of forceps, and feeling for the hard little bone. Some people who have been pulling otoliths for over ten years have an otolith intuition and don't have to fish around in the liquefied brain. The bone is preserved in a carefully labeled vial and sent to Olympia to be read by an expert in counting- I mean, fish aging.
Sounds fun, doesn't it? For some crazy reason, this kind of fish work doesn't bother me. But PLEASE don't make me handle a raw salmon in the kitchen! Ew! Skin! Scales! Gross!
...and don't leave your work in my compost, dearest husband.
