I’m giggling while Science chides me about noise pollution and fish –hoping to make me feel bad.

I suppose if I owned a boat I’d feel worse, but the article concludes that even short bursts of noise can distract fish while feeding, and they’ll make more errors in judgment and ingest things they shouldn’t …

The foraging mistakes are consistent with a shift in attention when exposed to noise, and in the natural environment these mistakes could be costly: increasing the chances of ingesting harmful items, and affecting the risk of predation if fish have to forage for longer to compensate for reduced efficiency.

I’m not so sure science was expecting to be serving information to the enemy, fellows like myself reading the conclusion and hanging on every word …

… but in elementary school we learned we could unnerve a good hitter at the plate by yelling, “hey batter-batta, SWING ..”, and anyone watching golf has to believe science, given anything louder than a duck fart sends a dimpled ball through someone’s picture window and muttered curses by even the most practiced golfer.

Can we induce a fish to eat something the wrong size, wrong species, and if so – how far away from the fishes maw do we trigger the underwater equivalent of a car alarm?

Taking it a step further, if we run out of the hot fly can a tantrum at the precise moment make something less worthy, extra-tasty? It’s certain we swear often enough in critical situations, perhaps we need to do so much louder …

I suppose SIMM’s will break the thousand-dollar barrier when it adds zippers and Sensurround, and then we can race each other out of parking lot to set hook while fiddling with the volume on Walkürenritt …