Catfish in a Tank

• K-Selection and r-Selection: Profound or Trivial? by James Brody, 6/28/97
  
  

Loren Eiseley (1957, The Immense Journey, NY:Vintage, pp. 23-24) found a catfish frozen in the Platte River. Eiseley took him home, encased in ice. The fish breathed as the ice thawed; Eiseley put him in a tank for the winter.

"He lived with me all that winter, and his departure was totally in keeping with his sturdy, independent character. In the spring a migratory impulse or perhaps sheer bordom struck him. Maybe in some little lost corner of his brain, he felt, far off, the pouring of the mountain waters through the sandy coverts of the Platte. Anyhow, something called to him and he went. One night when no one was about he simply jumped out of his tank. I found him dead on the floor next morning. He had made his gamble like a man --- or I should say, a fish. In the proper place, it would not have been a fool's gamble. Fishes in the drying shallows of intermittent prairie streams who feel their confinement and have the impulse to leap while there is yet time may regain the main channel and survive."

I've been and am that fish.

1969 was the first time. I was 27, a year to go in graduate school and hungry for a postdoc appointment. My advisor prodded me into calling Jim Olds who answered the phone himself and invited me to come to his lab in Ann Arbor for a day or two. I left Pittsburgh at 11 PM, through a sheet of rain. I beat my old Falcon wagon through the storm, across Ohio, often wedged between trucks. More than once I made the leap, around the semis, on a two lane road, to plow through their spray, gaining a slightly faster pace and better vision. It was a jackass gambit from some little lost corner of my brain.(1)

7/5/90 and I was 48. Like the fish, I was in a tank (working in civil service) that required little of me beyond compliance and breathing. I could handle the latter. My private practice was sputtering but looked like a route back to the main channel and freedom. I wanted to jump on July 4th, unfortunately a Sunday that year. There was the same Ohio, midnight, rainswept loneliness as I abandoned 18 years of service and became jobless for the first time in two decades, moving again from K- to r-Selection.(2)

I spotted the ADHD wave early 5 years ago but didn't work the crest. It surged around my paddling so I now occupy the succeeding trough. K-selection, through managed care and the continuing over-production of psychologists, has caught me again. Survival within psychology will depend on the ability to build and maintain alliances. However, this evolution "thing" bit me at 55. There's so much promise. The outcomes from an evolutionary approach to clinical work reinforce all the comfortable, familiar things in our traditional culture. It's a way of getting closer to home for many of us. It allows a different type of description and generates fun approaches that appear whimsical from traditional theory. Tank walls and truck spray are still there in the barriers, including the word "evolution" or the tongue knot, "sociobiology" that elicits puzzlement or anger, depending on your past experience with biology.

Once more, I'm jumping out of a tank, looking for the main channel.(3)

NOTES:

1) I remember Olds as lively, somewhat blunt, and short wearing dark slacks, a flannel shirt, and wool cap. He was using classical conditioning to trace thirst and hunger circuits in single neurons of the rat brain. He implanted 20 neurons at a time during the day and let a PDP 8 (9 or 10) test rats through the night. I remember several oriental postdocs analyzing the data; none of them appeared to have experienced sunlight for long intervals. His wife Marianne, a neuropsychopharmacologist, always got home on Wednesday afternoons a bit earlier to make goulash in time for him to go bowling. I sensed K-selection and I am an r-type; I was also obsessed with rhesus brains at the time and opted not to join him. Probably just as well; I recall his moving his lab to UCLA the next year and I would have gotten nothing done.

2) My bets were hedged more than a little. Diane still had her state position so health care and a modest income were assured. The practice sputtered and grew; my kid was able to stay in college and finish his engineering degree and none of us wore rags. Incidentally, the isolation phenomenon (along with hostility and depression) have been correlated with cardiac incidents. I had my turn!

3) Paul Conrad is/was a distinguished cartoonist and at the Denver Post while I was in college. I clipped, saved, and cannot retrieve the cartoon he drew when the first man orbited Earth. Conrad showed us a gangling adult male human, from the 3/4 rear, hunkered forward and striding towards the stars. There was a broken chain trailing from one ankle. Perhaps we all take similar walks at some point in our lives as individuals or as a species.

• Its All in the Family by John Fentress, 10/18/97