A meditation on minnows

August 2024

By Randy Randall

Paddling along the shore in the early morning, I often look over the side of the kayak and see schools of minnows darting here and there in the shallows – hundreds of them. They flit from rock to rock, twisting and turning in unison as if the school itself were an organism that functioned autonomously. Leaving my smartphone in its waterproof pouch, where it belongs on such an exploration short of some sort of emergency, I wonder how, when they turn, they all do it at once and in the same direction? How do they know? Which fish gives the signal, and how is it transmitted to the last fish in the line? They dart and swirl and dive all together. Do the same laws of motion govern flocks of birds, swarms of bees and herds of wildebeests? The natural world never fails to amaze.

But, even as the minnows swim about, the great blue heron stands in the shallows mere inches away, peering down into the water. The school of minnows are just out of range. Do the minnows know that death lurks nearby? And, if so, how? Do the tiny fish somehow plan their maneuvers so that the school swims safely out of range, or is it merely happenstance? Maybe the minnows don’t realize that an apex predator is standing just above them. This must be the case, because suddenly the school is within range. The heron reacts with lightning-fast reflexes – wham! In a nanosecond the fearsome beak stabs and lifts out of the water with a minnow; so fast and so accurate it’s like sleight of hand. How many minnows will it take to satisfy the deadly heron? Do the fish know that one of their numbers is missing? They seem to swim on, unperturbed. Did they scatter when the pointed beak broke the surface tension of the water or are the fish oblivious?

I drift along in my kayak and think about how nature provides these little uniform packets of protein, born from eggs too small to see, and now swimming and feeding as a school of many. Who can belong to the school? Are they all siblings or one generation of sprat? Why do they go where they go? Who’s the leader and why him or her or it? What influences their motions? Is it warmth, food, sunlight, or current? What drives them on a bright summer morning? Is their niche in nature to be food for the heron and the snapping turtle, another fearsome top-line predator that stalks the shallows and with reflexes that bely their appearance picks off minnow after minnow? Do they try to evade the black cormorant slipping beneath the surface and snatching at them? Are the minnows self-aware? Do they know they’re food? How would we know?

We have only our own human experience to call on for explanation. To help us answer how and why, we project human feelings and human behaviors onto the tiny fish and get no answers. Nature is obtuse. Every animal occupies a unique niche; some narrow, others broad. And somehow, in the grand scheme of things, hundreds of individual minnows are meant to swim as one in the muddy shallows near the reeds. The blue heron is uniquely equipped with long legs, long neck, stiletto beak, laser-beam eyesight and patience beyond understanding to hunt and eat minnows. How did that all come to be? Which came first; the minnows or the blue heron? Does the cycle ever fail? Are there years without schools of redbelly and pearl dace and tomcod and chubs? How many minnows does it take to satisfy one heron? Where is the balance point and who holds the scales?

What we don’t know about our natural world is astonishing and infinitely humbling. Even with our sciences and experiments and naturalists we’ve still barely scratched the surface. Is it any wonder that I think of my kayak as a marvelous discovery machine – a Zen-like device that lets me experience the natural world at very close range and challenges my mind with questions enough to occupy a lifetime.

Frequent contributor, correspondent and friend, Randy Randall is co-owner of Marston’s Marina in Saco, Maine, and a dreamer and waterman of the first order.

 

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