Guppies. You couldn’t be up to them.
As most people know, the guppy is a small member (although ‘small member’ may not be the apt phrase in this instance) of the Poecilidae family, native to South America and the Caribbean. In Trinidad they are colloquially known as “millions” on account of their marvellous profusion in the aquamarine waters of the paradisal islands.
They are also the world’s most popular aquarium fish, their attractiveness hugely enhanced by the winsome performance of the lovable Flounder in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.
What Disney didn’t tell us is that they are the divils for sex. The males, anyway. Your male guppy is so sexed-up with pulsing desire, females risk their lives to escape their pestering attention. A bit like dances in Inisowen in the 1960s.
Anyway. In a paper just published in The American Naturalist, Dr Darren Croft and a highly-trained research team from the University of Leeds report on an extended field-trip to the rainforests of Trinidad, where they found that female guppies tend to swim in habitats that contain many predators but few males. (I understand that Dr. Croft, 28, and his team had to spend months hanging out on the islets and inlets of palm-fringed atolls and coves, scuba-diving into sunlight refracted as shattered sapphire through gently rippled waters, amid the iridian swarm of the molluscs and bivalves, urchins and anemones – and guppies, too – to assemble the data to bring back to Yorkshire for study.)
Dr. Croft – PhD subject: ‘The shoaling behaviour of tropical fish’ – had posed the question: “Why do female guppies risk their lives in this way?’ His assiduous investigations have now supplied the answer: “Male guppies spend most of their time making sexual displays to females. But if his display doesn’t impress her, males will attempt to sneak a mating with her when she is not looking,” he is quoted in The American Naturalist.
“The bright colour patterns which the males use to attract females also attract the attention of predators. The female guppies use this to their advantage.”
The theory is that females venture deliberately into waters where predators lurk, so that males that follow them might be crunched to death by passing predators. The females also run a risk, of course, but it’s minor when compared to the deadly danger the males have been lured into. The females are seemingly willing to take their chances in order to escape sexual harassment by won’t-take-no-for-an-answer males.
Adds Dr Croft, wisely: “This pattern of behaviour is not restricted to fish. It is often found in deer and antelopes, and even in humans."
Indeed it is, Doc. I remember an August night in the Butt Hall, Ballybofey, Mick Delahunty and his Orchestra I think it was, and a lurch of lads in the bright shiny brown suits advancing up the floor in traditional formation, and a giggle of women at the mineral bar starting to move towards the side door that led out onto Devlin’s Field, Blade Park as it’s known today, and the fellows...
But that’s all I have time for. I’ll come back to this soon. Maybe.

Will people please stop coming up to me on the public street and asking in unnecessarily loud voices whether I was on a more exotic class of dope than I’m used to at the Springsteen gig at the Point, to have experienced the aural fantasy of hearing only ‘Johnny 99’ from the Boss-man’s back catalogue?
I haven’t been as embarrassed since the time I took a Jesus & Mary Chain album back to Dolphin Discs to complain about surface noise.
I can plead only that I was so swept up in the heft and swirl of the hootenanny that all experience with the exception of one stand-out meshed and merged in the memory.
Note: take notes.
A supernatural, extra-brilliant, intelligent night of the soul, though.
And, matter of fact, it was the usual gear.

If you see a chap in a mask and striped jumper and a big bulging bag slung over his shoulder with SWAG stencilled onto it in capitals climbing down a drainpipe from an open window of a neighbour’s house, don’t waste your time calling the guards. You might find yourself in trouble for wasting police time.
That’s if we go by the experience of Limerick crime-fighter Edward Horgan, who on the morning of June 15 saw two aircraft which he suspected were carrying illegal cargo on the runway at Shannon Airport and, like a good citizen, called the cops. Later the same day, he made a formal statement of complaint, witnessed by a Garda Ciaran Kennedy.
Horgan, a retired Irish Army officer, said in the statement that he had reason to believe that, in defiance of Irish law, both the aircraft were carrying armed troops, and that weapons, including M-16 automatic rifles and automatic pistols, were being transported in the main cabin and the hold of the craft. “I request that these two planes be searched immediately because their presence at Shannon airport contravenes the Hague Convention V 1907,” the statement continued. “I also request that these aircraft be searched to ensure that they are not carrying prisoners in contravention of the UN Convention on Torture.”
The statutory duty of the gardai on receipt of a complaint along these lines is to investigate whether there is any truth in the allegation and, if there is, to take appropriate action. It is only in circumstances in which the gardai have reason to believe the complaint is vexatious or irrational that this duty does not apply.
They can have had no reason for such belief in relation to Edward Horgan’s complaint, given that it came just four days after a cleaner at Shannon had discovered a manacled soldier on board a US aircraft parked on a runway. In that instance, the US government admitted, because it could do no other, that it had been wrong not to notify the Irish authorities of the purpose of the flight.
Following this admission, on June 13, Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern was reported saying that henceforth, “Gardai may carry out random checks of US planes using the airport.” There were many who suspected at the time that it had been the embarrassment of press coverage, not the fact of the offence, which had stiffened, as it seemed, the ministerial back bone.
But two days further on, no garda check at all on US planes which had been the subject, not of random suspicion, but of a specific complaint by a former senior member of the Irish security forces...
There is a great deal of oleaginous sentimentality about politics and politicians in southern Ireland. This might be understandable, just, when the object of the sentimentality has, for example, recently died, and there’s a family with feelings to be assuaged. But Ahern and his namesake as Taoiseach seem set on staying around, and on continuing to involve the Republic in a war which the vast majority of Irish people want nothing to do with and which has left tens of thousands of innocent other people dead.
What’s the case for balking at calling members of this government liars and hypocrites and accessories to mass murder?