Four Fish 1

Question 1

cascade

Answer 1

a steep usually small fall of water; especially : one of a series

“I followed the outflow of the pond down a series of cascades that in turn flattened out into a low, sampy meadow of deep oxbow lakes.” (3)

Question 2

ersatz

Answer 2

being a usually artificial and inferior substitute or imitation

“Several hundred dollars made it into my account after an ersatz bar mitzvah that my partially Jewish family cobbled together for me when I turned thirteen, and through a debt-leveraged matching grant from the depths of m mother’s complicated finances I was able to purchase a used aluminum boat and a twenty-horsepower outboard engine.” (3)

Question 3

quarry

Answer 3

animal hunted or caught for food

Question 4

tern

Answer 4

a kind of bird that lives near the ocean, is usually black and white, and has long wings and a tail with two points

Question 5

rivet

Answer 5

A non-removable fastener.

“If a rivet came loose from the hull of my boat-a sometime occurrence, since the hull had not been anodized to withstand salt water-i would slip off a flip flop and hold the errant piece of metal in place with my big toe.”

Question 6

atavism (biology)

Answer 6

traits of distant ancestors that reappear in the modern day.

MD - Whale with feet, humans with tails

Question 7

atavism (socially)

Answer 7

people in the modern era reverting to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time.

“the years of my boat and ‘my’ ocean gave me a deep, atavistic belief in the resilience of nature.”

MD The word atavism is derived from the Latin atavus. An atavus is a great-great-great-grandfather or, more generally, an ancestor.

Question 8

fallow

Answer 8

left unplowed and unseeded during a growing season.

“With mines and submarines ready to blow up any unsuspecting fishing vessel, much of the North Atlantic’s depleted fishing grounds were left fallow and fish increased their numbers significantly.” (12)

Question 9

gustatory

Answer 9

of or relating to gustation (the faculty of distinguishing sweet, sour, bitter, and salty properties in the mouth

“But the fish we have chosen to tame are by and large animals that satisfy whimsical gustatory predilections rather than the requirements of sound ecologically based husbandry.”

Question 10

knot

Answer 10

The knot is a unit of speed equal to one nautical mile (1.852 km) per hour, approximately 1.151 mph.

“Riding the Race’s six-knot currents on an outgoing tide, the salmon would make a hundred-mile jaunt to Long Island Sound’s terminus at Orient Point before breaking northeast twenty-five hundred miles to the Labrador.” (16)

Question 11

genome

Answer 11

A genome is an organism’s complete set of DNA, including all of its genes. Each genome contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism. In humans, a copy of the entire genome—more than 3 billion DNA base pairs—is contained in all cells that have a nucleus.

“The Spanish salmon were in fact the first salmon, the strain that birthed the entire Atlantic salmon genome, which millions of years earlier had radiated out across the Atlantic.

Question 12

capelin

Answer 12

very small northern fish; forage for sea birds and marine mammals and other fishes.

“In Greenland they found not only cold, oxygen-rich water but also an abundance of oily kirll, capelin, and other forage, which they consumed in large amounts and sotred up as rich supplies of fats…(17)

Question 13

omega-3 fatty acids

Answer 13

an unsaturated fatty acid of a kind occurring chiefly in fish oils, with three double bonds at particular positions in the hydrocarbon chain.

“fats that humans would come to associate with the heart healthy omega-3 fatty acids, compounds that have the unique capacity to keep muscle and vascular tissue pliant and vibrant in subzero temperatures.” (17)

“When eaten by humans, these compounds have the same effect on human vascular tissue-keeping veins and arteries fitter and more youthful longer.” (55)

Question 14

Nova Scotia

Answer 14

a province in eastern Canada that consists of the Nova Scotia peninsula and adjoining Cape Breton Island; pop. 913,462 (2006); capital, Halifax.

“As recently as my early childhoood in the late 1960s, Nova Scotia salmon, often called ‘Nova Lox’ by New Yorkers, were wild fish, harvested from several wild runs that spawned in the rivers of Atlantic Canada” (19)

Question 15

Salmo salar

Answer 15

Atlantic Salmon in the family salmonidae. It is found in the northern Atlantic Ocean and in rivers that flow into the North Atlantic.