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Around the same time, while reading the angling papers, I spotted an advertisement for a vacancy
working on coarse fish breeding research with a new organisation to be known as the National Rivers
Authority (NRA), which was about to be split off from the various water authorities by the government
as part of its water industry privatisation scheme.
After much careful and concerned consideration I applied for it, was interviewed, and amazingly, at the
age of almost forty two without my final results being available, I got the job, which was a bitter-sweet
moment in that it meant while I would have an income, I was never going to be able to do research work
full-time.
Still, there was always part time. But either way, I would first have to find a suitable project, then a
financial backer, which several frustrating years later I finally managed to do with Dr. John Manning
of Liverpool University as a potential supervisor, the Environment Agency as the National Rivers
Authority had then become as a financial backer, and with the three spined stickleback as a study subject
for my research.
Before looking in detail at the project itself, there are two fundamental preparatory pieces of information
I would like briefly to put on to the table, the first of which is to remind people of the fact that physical
adaptation to environmental change by living organisms is one of the corner stones of Darwinian
evolution.
Organisms best adapted to survive changing conditions through favourable helpful genetic mutations,
when they pass these traits forward to their offspring, these can over time become incorporated into the
population where they first occurred, giving those individuals inheriting them either a better shot at
surviving the changes in question, or the opportunity to take advantage of any new niches which may
open up to them as a result.
By the same token, physical changes which are not heritable, and therefore cannot be passed forward,
even though they may result from environmental change or stress, play no part in the evolutionary
process.
I make these points because as will become apparent when I get into more detail shortly, in terms of
viability, my proposed project could have gone either way, so the evolutionary implications were very
clearly there.
Interestingly, one particular survival adaptation I did come across in sticklebacks was that in rivers
where predation from other larger fish was a constant threat, increased length of the pelvic fin spines
was almost universal, as this trait would make any individual having it that was subsequently taken by
a predator extremely difficult to swallow, and therefore more likely to be ejected.
Now for the research project in summary.........
Most animals and plants exhibit symmetry in some form or other. In the case of anglers and most of the
fish we seek to catch, this comes when an imaginary line is drawn from the top of the head to the feet
(or in the case of fish, to the tail) along the centre of the body, the left side of which is in effect a mirror
image of the right.
I say most fish, because flatfish such as plaice and turbot which have deliberately settled out on the
bottom on one or other side of their body do not conform to this pattern, instead having what it known
as directional asymmetry.
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