Carefreefish
Someone in one of the departments of evolutionary theory had a vague idea in mind. It had to be a fish. A swimming, pointy creature that loves the subtropics.
That was roughly the brief before construction began.
Even before the first prototype sketch, the fish already had a family called Xiphiidae, whose name came from Greece. The fellow is a genuine cosmopolitan, at home in all the world’s oceans. But only as long as he — or she — finds temperate water temperatures of thirteen degrees. On average. Should the temperature fail to deliver, both of them are gone. Precisely these and other demands have bestowed upon the sea creature this quality of carefreeness. Mind you: carefree is the wrong word. The construction is very much cared-for. Heavily so. The long, slender thing is fitted with a full-grown sword. Wicked tongues have suggested that this long thing at the tip was a forerunner of Pinocchio’s nose. That is, of course, complete nonsense, because Pinocchio wasn’t even alive back then.
The Department for the Genus Fish at Evolution Inc. showed considerable inventiveness when it came to the swordfish. Generally speaking. The Xiphiidae is equipped with a few tricks that would make even James Bond go green with envy. When it comes to sheer velocity, the fish of the sword is right at the front of the pack. Installed in the head is a nozzle that produces an oily secretion distributed across the entire head. Not unlike Al Pacino’s head in The Godfather. With the oiled head, the resistance of the current is outwitted. Whether this works for Al Pacino too? We don’t know.
As with any production, Evolution Inc. botched things a couple of times as well. Someone forgot entirely that a blindingly fast object should also be able to stop at some point. If only for insurance reasons. Well, the swordfish known as Xiphiidae does not have this stopping distance built in. Why? The planner or planners forgot to give the old fish any pectoral fins. In fairness to the planners: when the starting gun fired for the swordfish’s existence, there was hardly anything in the ocean to run into. Neither ships nor nets could have stopped the speeding fish, simply because neither existed yet.
The first wooden ships then had some rather hole-y experiences with the speed demons of the world’s oceans. Many a Xiphiidae, travelling at full force — no brakes, after all — crashed straight into a ship’s hull. The sword did its job admirably and drilled a tidy hole into the floating bucket.
The carefreefish was caught, regulated, and demoted to the common swordfish by the slow creep of civilisation. And with that, it was the end of the free, unlimitedly racing Formula 1 creature of the ocean — because braking is something Xiphiidae still hasn’t learnt. What’s more, the civilisers were lying in wait with underhanded contraptions: fishing rods with hooks, wide-spread nets, and harpoons.
The long history of the Xiphiidae family nonetheless fills a considerable number of pages. Fossils that were dug up — most of them looking somewhat petrified — could be examined in depth. And what did the researchers discover? The prototype of the Xiphiidae was launched approximately 48 million years ago.
Well, if that isn’t an achievement, what is? The carefreefish had 47 million and nine hundred thousand years to race through the water. Only then did Evolution Inc. decide to inflict upon the planet a combination of ape and homo. Homo sapiens won.
Of that, however, the Xiphiidae knew nothing, being somewhere out in one of the oceans, carefree in the fast lane.
What’s for lunch today? Ah, fish.
