On the plane I thought I’d do more writing, but I didn’t really.
I thought I was going to play Mother 3, a never-released-outside-of-japan cult
classic that Nintendo produced in 2006, that’s supposed to be the bee’s knees.
Fan translations are supposed to be top knotch and I wanted to compare the
experiences of travelling to consuming culturally specific media. But after
spinning up a little flashcard game to help me learn Malay, I realized I’m
ginormous and can’t comfortably use my computer and be inside of an airplane at
the same time.
Instead, I watched the Great British Bake Off, and well done
Britain! Great show, very British. It’s only now that I realize I could’ve just
used that show as my exemplar platform to talk about regional media. Oh well,
maybe later.
I have a 24 hour layover here. I rented a small nap room for
6 hours. I slept some more on a bench. When everything opened back up, I went
to Starbucks. I know that’s not cool cuz you’re supposed to try new things or
whatever when you’re traveling, but they had a scrambled egg bread bowl. So get
over it, lumpsucker (casual friendly insults are being replaced with lesser
known marine animals for the duration of this piece).
I’m going to Malaysia where my main activity will be diving
of the SCUBA variety, not the wobbly sandpaper board type. I think I’m afraid
of those.
I’m stoked to hang out with the fishes in their natural
habitat. I love fish. Hence being an educator at an aquarium. However, there
was a conundrum that came up frequently at the aqua.
There’s this thing called anthropomorphizing, where you
associate human attributes to animals. For example, a fish looking "happy" or "sad". This happens with all animals, but I’m
going to stay aquatic with my examples as it’s my DOE (Domain of Expertise).
Anthropomorphizing is considered bad because fishes aren’t
people, they’re very different. They live underwater and have entirely
different physical structures to accommodate this. Even among the “Things That
Live Underwater” category, you have this huge genre of animals adapting to
their environment. Crabs don’t look like Gobies, Eels don’t look like Sharks,
and Coral don’t look like Whales. AT ALL. You’d have to be a complete blobfish
to mix those up.
So when you have all these different forms meeting all these
different functions, it’s really hard to say what the experience of the animal
is. Because you don’t have those forms, you don’t have fins, or scales, or
gills, and you only have a regular bladder.
...
Fish have swim bladders (I usually don’t put my jokes on
easy mode, but I realized many people probably wouldn’t know that).
But here’s the thing, my whole job was to interpret the behavior
of fishes. Millions of people’s passions and careers and research have been
based on this stuff. So when people look at a fish and go “Oh it looks happy!
It’s smiling”, you kind of have to tone down that read. You have to offer a
more nuanced perspective of the situation.
The Kissing Gourami gets its name from its behavior when two
individuals press their lips together, looking as though they’re kissing. So
people will look at that and go “Oh cute fish!” and it will be a very
successful fish to keep in aquaria. But those fish aren't displaying any kind of
affection, they’re actually fighting. It’s probably two dude bros fighting over
territory.
 |
| Kissing Gouramis doing their thing |
And I no longer think that anthropomorphization is inherently
a bad thing. I actually think that it’s the only way we can understand and
document animal behavior. We still have a responsibility to be accurate,
resistant to applying cultural norms, and willing to change when presented with
new information. But fundamentally, I think the only way we can interpret animal behavior
is through a human lens. We can't examine the behavior of Gourami as Gourami because we're not Gourami.
Let’s do another one. Many species of Goby, Clownfish and
the California Sheephead will change their gender under certain conditions. All
Sheephead are born female, and the largest and most territorial of the females
will change into a male. The subtext here, and occasionally entire marketing
campaigns, is that it’s ok to change gender. And it is.
But there’s so much wrong with validating the experience of
someone who feels they are another gender, by comparing them to a fish. I
understand that we’re trying to combat the notion that “it’s not natural”, because obviously it is. But that comes with a boatload of other problems. Like we
praise the Sheephead for changing genders, but then we have to quickly turn
around and say that transgenderism is normal in humans but then aggressive behavior
in males is normal for Sheephead but not humans. Also, as far as I can tell,
Sheephead only go from female to male (monandric - http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3160/0038-3872-108.1.16).
 |
| A male Cali Sheephead |
So we’re selectively picking the parts of animal behavior that
best support our own ideologies, and that’s wrong. We need to be more critical.
We can’t say what behavior is “normal” across species. Maybe just respiration.
That being said, it is dope that Sheephead change genders.
Like that is so so cool. And we should absolutely bring it up as a highlight of
the species. And you can also identify with the Sheephead’s transgenderism, and
it can be your mascot or “spirit animal” or whatever. Creating a better
understanding of the world and yourself through animals is great!
Perhaps it’s harder because when you’re working at an aquarium
with the general public. It’s really difficult to communicate all this
information to some purple gudgeon off the street.
