FEAST OR FAMINE

  Opposite the entrance gate of the Paris Garden of Plants ( Jardin des Plantes ) is the snake fountain. Actually, it is called the Cuvier Fountain in memory of Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist and zoologist.     On the corner of Rue Cuvier in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the site was formally the prison of the Abbey of Saint-Victor which had a fountain called the Alexander Fountain or the Brush Fountain. The prison, including the fountain, was demolished in 1840.   French architect Alphonse Vigoureux (1802-1853) was the water inspector for the city of Paris. He created the snake fountain from 1840-1846 to pay respect to Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) to replace the Alexander Fountain. Jean Leopold Nicolas Frederic – Baron Cuvier – is best known as the “father of paleontology” and establishing that species extinction was a fact in his work  Essay on the Theory of the Earth  (1813). The French government listed it as a historical monument in 1984.   ...

Frenchman Henri de la Blanch è re (1821-1880), born Pierre Moulin du Coudray de la Blanch è re, was a naturalist, photographer, and ichthyologist (a marine biologist who studies fish). In 1856, de la Blanch è re became a professional photographer and opened a workshop in Paris located at 39 Boulevard des Capucines. Prior to the workshop, the premises accommodated the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1820-1853.   In 1926, the French publishing house Charles Delagrave printed copies of de la Blanch è re’s lithographs in a book with leather binding, called  La pêche et les poisons: dictionnaire des pêches  –  Fishing and Fishes: Dictionary of Fisheries.   The lithographs include fish such as the manta ray, eel, double-banded soapfish, fourlined terapon, red seabream, three-bearded rocking, European perch, Queen snapper, and the bluespotted goatfish. MARTINA NICOLLS MartinaNicollsWebsite    I    Rainy Day Healing    I    Marti...

 

  When the Night Comes  by Favel Parrett (2014) is set in Tasmania, an island state of Australia, in the capital city Hobart, in the 1980s. Isla and her brother were going to a new place with their mother – an island in the middle of the sea: Tasmania. Leaving the mainland of Australia was supposed to make their lives better, but their mother’s perpetual sadness pervaded their everyday lives.  Their mother found a house to rent – a dark, shadowy house in a cold, damp coastal city – a house without an inside toilet; the toilet was an outhouse in the back garden.  Isla sees a red ship and her eyes light up. She didn’t expect a sailor from the ship to befriend her mother, but she is glad he did. She loves the stories of his Danish home, his life on the seas, and his expeditions to Antarctica. It sounded so adventurous and exotic and, well, so different from her own mundane, sad, lonely existence in a country at the bottom of the world. ‘All the things he told me, I want...

A new Zebra Shark has joined the large pool in the Paris Aquarium in the capital of France. The Zebra Shark has been named Rôti, which is French for Roast. It joins other Zebra Sharks but Rôti is easily recognized because it is the smallest of the Zebra Sharks.   Rôti comes from the Skegness Aquarium in England, as part of an exchange for the preservation of species. Skegness is a seaside town in Lincolnshire on the east coast of England. The Skegness Aquarium opened in 2015.   The Zebra Shark ( Stegostoma fasciatum ) is an endangered marine (saltwater) fish in the Stegostomatidae family of carpet sharks. It is an elasmobranch cartilaginous fish — a fish that does not have a bony skeleton.   The Zebra Shark has a slim, cylindrical body with a slightly flattened head, and a short, blunt snout (nose). It is pale with a pattern of dark spots that is different for each shark. It has five ridges along its body. It eyes are small and its nose has short barbe...

  On 2 August 2022, a Beluga Whale strayed into France‘s River Seine in the northwest of the country, where the river meets the sea at the English Channel.    This is a rare sighting. It is only the second recorded sighting of a Beluga Whale in a French river since 1948 when a fisherman in the estuary of the Loire river found one in his nets.    It is easily recognizable by its pale skin and bulbous forehead. An adult Beluga Whale can grow to 4 metres (13 feet) in length.    By 6 August, it had travelled about 70 kilometres (44 miles) north of Paris.   The L’Eure region prefecture in Normandy say that the Beluga Whale normally lives in arctic and sub-arctic waters, and sometimes it strays into more southern waters. They say it can temporarily survive in freshwater.     Authorities, who are tracking the whale by drone, boat and sonar, are urging people not to approach it so as not to stress it, but are concerned about its health. It ...