Fish brains

I watched David Attenborough's 'Nature's Great Events' on New Zealand's TV One last night.

There's no doubt about it. Nature documentaries make me cry. I thought this was just a childhood weakness left long in the past. phht.. bears killing fish, whales drowning.. grow up, this stuff happens every day. I eat fish for dinner.

But no. Call me an emotional female, but scenes of dying fish can make me weep.

This particular episode told the story of 'The Great Salmon Run' -- an epic journey made by millions of Atlantic Salmon every year to reach their birth place and spawn again. (I'm unsure exactly why they need to reproduce in the exact same location as their parents. In human terms that would be mildly disgusting, and somewhat fishy...). To achieve their one first and last act of reproduction, the salmon are forced to swim upstream in shallow oxygen-deprived water, leap up waterfalls equivalent to a 4-story building in our terms, and dodge hungry bears.

The ability of this documentary to completely humanise these fish left me emotionally drained. I wondered what goes on inside their tiny fish brains as they push their aching bodies to the extremes, or face the gaping jaws of a grizzly bear. Do they feel pain and fear and exhilaration as we do? As we neared the end of the story, gentle love scenes between two dying fish on a shallow river floor before they donated their nitrogen-rich bodies to the river, evoked me to hum 'The Circle of Life" from "The Lion King" out loud.

I doubt I'm alone. I know there's something innate inside every one of our brains that makes us empathise with other beings. Perhaps this is a purely human trait, as theory of mind dictates? Clearly the production team behind David Attenborough knows how to take full advantage of our 'humanity' to draw us into the documentary.

Even so, after the hour-long documentary draw to a close, I held a greater respect for salmon than I ever have before. No longer just overly-priced pink flesh taunting me from behind the seafood counter at the supermarket. Now I'm wondering what this 'sustainable fishing' (a term I previously rejected due to fear of hippies) is all about.

What I do know is that humans (in our Western society anyway) have it made. Whilst we are capable of feeling fear and pain, most people do not experience these emotions during the simple act of reproduction. I hope that nothing much is going on inside their fish brains, for their sake.