Blame It on the Dog by Jim Dawson Page B

none of them has gained the legendary stature of Hoof Hearted. In my mind’s eye, I can see that proud fellow at full gallop, flared nostrils steaming, as the announcer yells, “Hoof Hearted is rounding the bend and coming up the rear!” And yes, of course he wins by a nose.

PULL MY FIN
    I n the 1973 novel
Breakfast of Champions
, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, came up with an alien race called the Tralfamadorians, who communicated by tap dancing and farting. Far-fetched? Well, maybe the tap dancing. But right here on earth we have nonfictional creatures who use flatulence as a kind of primitive language—and no, I’m not talking about twelve-year-old boys.
    For example, in the August 2000 issue of
Discovery
magazine, writer Josie Glausiusz observed that the deadly Sonoran coral snake and the western hook-nosed snake—both natives of the American Southwest—have an odd way of scaring off predators. “When threatened,” she wrote, “they emit rumbling air bubbles from the cloaca, the common opening for sex and excretion at a snake’s rear end.” Both types of snake have muscles that can form pockets of compressed air and then release them in loud pops. Bruce Young, an experimental morphologist at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, told Glausiusz, “Essentially it’s snake flatulence.”
    A couple of years later, in another realm altogether, Dr. Ben Wilson, marine biologist at the University of British Columbia’s Bamfield Marine Science Centre, heard a strange noise emanating from his lab’s herring aquarium one evening. “At first, I thought someone was hiding in the cupboard pulling a prank,” he said later. Turning up the volume of the fish tank microphone, he heard whatsounded like farts, accompanied by tiny air bubbles coming from the rear ends of several herring.
    Intrigued by this phenomenon, Dr. Wilson picked up the telephone and enlisted the help of Robert Batty, senior research scientist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, Scotland. While Wilson studied Pacific herring caught in British Columbia, Batty focused on Atlantic herring from the British seacoast. The fish were placed into laboratory tanks where they could be studied with hydrophones and infrared video cameras. Sure enough, whether Canadian or British, the herring farted in high-frequency bursts up to twenty-two kilohertz, accompanied always by streams of bubbles. At times, the tanks resembled old Lawrence Welk TV shows, and the fish didn’t seem to be the least bit embarrassed about it, because there wasn’t a red herring in the bunch.
    “It sounds very much like someone blowing a high-pitched raspberry,” Batty told James Owen in the November 10, 2003, edition of
National Geographic News
. At first, Batty and Wilson suspected that the herring used their depth charges to frighten off predators, or for buoyancy, like the sand tiger shark that gulps air at the water’s surface, swallows it into its stomach, and farts out whatever is required for it to maintain its depth under water.
    The herring were in fact gulping air at the surface like sand tiger sharks and storing it in their swim bladder, not using stomach gas from food digestion. But Drs. Batty and Wilson determined that the herring were releasing air bubbles not for buoyancy but rather as a way of maintaining contact with each other after dark without giving away their positions to predatory fish, whose hearing is less acute.
    This “water-breaking” seemed like one of those discoveries that could elevate a mere researcher into a respected, perhaps even famous scientist, but when Ben Wilson sat down to prepare an article for the prestigious British scientific journal
Biology Letters
, he had a problem. How do you describe farting fish “without sounding too silly,” as he put it later? The secret lay in scientific-sounding euphemisms.
    Fish farts? Too colloquial, not to mention vulgar.
    Piscine poots? Not