Chapter 3

Scott’s Story

At the New England Aquarium, Scott’s Amazon tank showcases species he found in the wild.

 

“Sea monkeys!”

According to Scott’s family lore, these were the first two words he uttered as an infant.

Back onboard the top deck of the Dorinha, as we steam toward Barcelos under sunny skies, Scott tells me how tending fish has always played a pivotal role in his life.

He was the youngest of six kids, and his playpen was in a room where one of his siblings had set up an aquarium for Sea-Monkeys—the brand name for brine shrimp sold in popular hatching kits. When little Scott noticed the tiny babies hatching out, he started screaming his head off: “Sea monkeys! Sea monkeys!”

 

Scott tends to the Amazon tank from behind the scenes.

 

Immersed in his work, Scott walks among the fish of his beloved Amazon tank.

 

By the time he was old enough for kindergarten, Scott was often off with his brothers and sister, catching sunfish and tadpoles, exploring Cranberry Pond near his home in Weymouth, Massachusetts. They brought the tadpoles home to watch them turn into frogs, and soon Scott had amassed quite a menagerie: fish, frogs, salamanders, turtles. He also rescued birds with broken wings. “My mom had only one rule: no snakes,” he remembers. But he couldn’t resist taking home a snake, too. “My mom only found out about the snake because me and my siblings were looking under the furniture for it.” (It was a harmless garter snake.)

By the time Scott was seven, the creatures he brought home from Cranberry Pond had more company. Housing them in tanks scavenged from neighbors’ trash and bought from yard sales, he now kept pet cardinals, splash tetras, and swordtails, bought with money earned from doing yard work around the neighborhood, and later, a paper route. He loved to ride his Schwinn Stingray downtown to his favorite pet store, Barks N’ Bubbles, to watch the fish there.

“Rowdy kids would come and slam on the tanks,” Scott remembers. “The owner, Joe, would breathe fire on these kids. And he’d say to me, ‘Can you believe those kids?’”

The pet-store owner knew that Scott was different. He wasn’t a bother. He let Joe work. He didn’t touch stuff. Most of the time in the pet store he acted as if he were invisible. He watched; he listened—just as one day in the Amazon he would float, still and silent, waiting for tiny wild fish to come out from hiding.

Joe changed water in the tanks all day long, siphoning out old water and refilling with fresh. One day, Scott remembers, Joe left the water running in a tank while he was talking with customers. Scott saw that the tank was about to overflow. It was then, he says, that he flew into action: “I broke from my invisibility cloak and crossed the line.” He moved the hose just in time. “And over the customer’s shoulder,” he recalls, “Joe gave me a little nod. That’s when I became an aquarist.”

When Scott got older, around age twelve, he’d ride his bike farther from home. He’d cycle to Quincy, duck under the turnstiles to the subway, and get out at the aquarium stop in Boston. His parents had taken him, as a baby in diapers, to the aquarium on its opening day, June 20, 1969, and he’d been enchanted ever since. He’d sneak into the aquarium by putting a smudge on his hand that looked like the entry stamp for paying patrons, and he’d spend the day watching fish to his heart’s content.

By the time he was a teenager, Scott had several dozen tanks at home. “I’d hang out in the basement with my fish and wonder about my future,” he remembers. He was distressed that his siblings seemed to have already chosen their career paths, fulfilling their destinies. A brother had played with a pedal police car as a tot; now he was preparing for a career in law enforcement. His sister, who had loved to dress up as a nurse, was in college, studying nursing. “And I’d come up from the basement . . . everyone else knew their thing, and I’m just playing with fish.” By the end of high school Scott figured that he might as well become an accountant like his dad—though he didn’t think he’d like it.

 

Scott communes with one of the two electric eels.

 

Then one day he was watching George Page in Nature on TV “and a light bulb went off in my head.” He thought, “I do have a thing! This is what I’m all about!” Within weeks of that realization he became a volunteer at the aquarium. He was eighteen.

As two pink dolphins rise, gasp, and dive back beneath the dark river, Scott remembers his first day at the New England Aquarium. “They told me the job wouldn’t be glamorous. It was wet, smelly work, chopping fish and cleaning floors.” But immediately he was set up with a wetsuit, and his first task was helping draw blood from an Atlantic white-sided dolphin!

At ten A.M. on his first day of volunteering Scott found himself kneeling in a tank in which the water level had been lowered to two feet, working with a team of experts, wrestling with a dolphin named Silver, a stranding victim who was sick with a respiratory disease. Scott couldn’t believe his luck.

As everyone held the dolphin still, the aquarium’s top dolphin specialist told the team, “Whatever you do, nobody put your face over the blowhole!” Silver’s respiratory disease could have been contagious; it was possible that humans could catch it. “But with all the adrenaline pumping and the white noise,” Scott remembers, “what I heard was ‘Somebody—put your face over the blowhole!’ But nobody was doing it! And I was the only one in the face-over-the-blowhole position.” So he immediately stuck his face right over the diseased dolphin’s blowhole.

His boss yanked Scott up by the hair.

Days later, poor Silver died of his respiratory infection. But Scott remained healthy. And despite his early mistake, he thrived as a volunteer.

Still, he wasn’t doing so great at school. “I started going to uMass Boston, and I did terrible,” he admits. “I had a GPA of .86. I wasn’t much of a reader. I’m not a book person, and college involves a lot of books.” He was learning much more at the aquarium than at school, and he found himself volunteering more and more hours—sometimes instead of going to classes.

Then he had another stroke of luck—and he was in the right place at the right time to benefit. He had been volunteering for a year and a half when the head of the Fishes Department called Scott into his office. It was a busy time at the aquarium: there had been a mass pilot whale stranding on Cape Cod, and the staff had rescued three of them for rehabilitation and release. An aquarist had left, and a job opening needed to be filled—fast. Would Scott take the job?

You bet he would!

By age twenty-one Scott found himself taking charge not only of the aquarium’s popular tide pool exhibit but also of the institution’s newest changing exhibit—an Amazon-themed gallery, complete with rainforest canopy, hummingbirds, emerald tree boas, poison arrow frogs, walking stick insects, and tanks of Amazonian fish, including cardinal tetras.

Soon after his first trip to South America, he would be able to concentrate exclusively on his specialty—freshwater animals. Though he never completed his undergraduate degree, he would go on to earn a master’s degree in aquaculture from the University of Stirling in Scotland. He wrote his thesis on how to reduce stress in cardinal tetras exported from the Río Negro to aquariums in Scotland.

This was an ambitious project. How can you tell if a tiny fish is feeling stress? But it was an important question. You can’t always tell that a fish is stressed by looking at it. Yet stress can kill a fish, weakening its immune system enough that it can succumb to infections, parasites, and injuries that otherwise would pose no danger. But how do you measure stress response in the blood chemistry of a fish so small?

Scott adapted such gadgets as glucose meters used by diabetics for use in the field on these tiny animals. He tested the blood for a hormone called cortisol, the same hormone associated with stress in human beings. He discovered that tiny cardinal tetras could, in fact, be subjected to dangerous stresses during their long trip. And he found that not all fish were suffering. What made the difference?

Thanks to this new set of instruments and the data they made possible, Scott could next focus on subtle differences in the way individual fishers handled the animals. He found, for instance, that there was a huge difference between fish scooped up with kitchen strainers and ones collected in hollow gourds. The kitchen strainers damaged the protective mucus coating of the fish and hurt their delicate skin.

Scott began the series of studies that many onboard the Dorinha and its sister ship, the Iracema, will continue to expand upon on this trip. What “best handling practices” can be developed to protect the fish from stress and disease, make them competitive in the global market, and return the most benefits to the fishing communities that are the stewards of the environment?

Keeping fish healthy and happy is a job Scott deals with every day at the New England Aquarium. In Boston, he is in charge of two electric eels, one three-foot-long and three thirteen-foot-long anacondas, fifteen red-bellied piranhas, 2,644 cardinal tetras, and ten thousand other freshwater animals—from fish to turtles to toads—all of them in leafy, naturalistic exhibits that he is constantly improving. He wants to keep his animals in peak condition. He loves each one. And equally important, each creature in his Amazon gallery is an ambassador for its jungle home.

 

Scott works with volunteer April Pinnick to prune plants in the electric eel exhibit.

 

Scott hopes to bring visitors “face to face with the Amazon” when they look in on one of these tanks—even in sometimes snowy Boston. It’s an experience he considers essential. “More than a million people come through the New England Aquarium in a year,” he says, “and we need to change the lives of all of them. We need to turn them into conservationists.”

On the Dorinha, it’s now five p.m., and two macaws fly overhead. They disappear into the leafy crown of a huge buttressed tree on the riverbank. “This time of day, you see a lot of parrots,” Scott explains. Because we’re so near the equator, the sun sets around six every night, year-round, and rises around six each morning. The parrots are finding safe roosts where they can spend the night.

Soon we’ll be heading for bed too. After dinner we’ll retreat to our cabin bunks early. Tomorrow we’ll arrive in Barcelos—where we’ll join the throngs getting ready for the Ornamental Fish Festival, the biggest celebration of the year.

 

Staff aquarist Andrew Murphy inspects plants in the Amazon tank—plants he saw growing wild when he accompanied Scott on the Amazon expedition for Project Piaba.

THE SEVEN DEADLY PLAGUES OF THE AMAZON DEBUNKED (SORT OF)

• STINGRAY: The poison-tipped tail spine is no joke. The fish deploys this defensive weapon the way a scorpion wields a stinger, whipping it forward in a fraction of a second. Strong and sharp enough to penetrate bone, the spine breaks off in the wound. The stingray can grow a new spine—but leaves its victim with an unhappy problem, because the spine is barbed like an arrowhead, and very difficult to extract. But extract it you must, because until you do, the poisonous mucus with which it’s covered will continue to dissolve your flesh. The good news is that stingrays don’t attack. They use the tail spine only in selfdefense. And happily, there’s a sure-fire way to avoid them. Scott showed us how to do the Stingray Shuffle: When you walk along the bottom, slide your feet along instead of stepping. The stingrays will graciously move out of the way.

• JAO: They do get very large—big enough that it would take three or four strong men to hold one up out of the water. But you are more likely to eat a jao catfish than a jao is likely to eat you. On the Internet you can see lots of photos of fishermen proudly holding up giant jao catfish. What you won’t see is any real evidence that one ever killed a person. How did the jao get such a bad rep? When you travel everywhere on the water, drowning is a serious danger (like a car crash for people who travel on roads), and many catfish scavenge any corpses they can find, including those of humans.

• ELECTRIC EEL Yes, it can give you a painful shock—but only if you bother it. Electric eels, who are more closely related to carp and catfish than to the freshwater eels we know from North America and Europe, are amazingly common in Amazon waters (one survey found they were the most abundant fish in the stretch of river studied!), but they seldom bother people. To find their prey and navigate with their weak eyes in the flooded forest, they emit a low-level charge, less than ten volts, which doesn’t hurt. Electric eels save their powerful blasts for stunning prey and repelling predators.

• ANACONDA: These big snakes certainly could eat people—but they don’t. In 2014, as a TV stunt, a filmmaker wearing a custom-built snake-proof suit tried to get eaten by an anaconda—and failed. The world’s top expert on anacondas, Jesus Rivas, knows of no documented instance of an anaconda eating a human, ever—though he admits that most people purposely stay away from areas where they know these giant snakes live.

• BLACK CAIMAN: Growing to six hundred pounds, living for nearly a century, this largest of the six species of South American caimans is so strong that only a jaguar can kill an adult (and the jaguar doesn’t always win). But the caiman’s worst predators are humans. In the 1950s and ’60s, people killed so many black caimans for their meat and skins that the species nearly went extinct. Happily, they are now making a comeback. The Brazilian conservation biologist Ronis Da Silveira has captured and tagged more than three thousand of them—including a fifteen-footer he wrestled for forty minutes—and he insists that if you don’t bother them, they are rather calm.

• PIRANHA: “Aren’t piranhas dangerous?” This is one of the most frequent questions Scott is asked. “The standard answer,” he says, “is ‘only when they’re spawning.’” But there was a time when he and a colleague were snorkeling in shallow water in the middle of an intense piranha spawning frenzy. Piranhas were bouncing off their heads, but they were never bitten—nor was Scott when, as an experiment, he offered one of the supposedly most “aggressive” species of piranha his bleeding hand. What about Theodore Roosevelt’s stories? Turns out that the local people, eager to impress a visiting American president, held a bunch of piranhas captive for days without feeding them—and then released them, allowing the president to watch them feed hungrily on chunks of horse meat.

• CANDIRU: What this tiny fish is reputed to do sure makes it one of the scariest of the Seven Deadly Plagues. The researcher Stephen Spotte spent four years investigating the stories, traveling the Amazon, talking with locals, fish researchers, and doctors, and he could not find a single scientifically documented case of this happening. Only in 1997 did researchers discover a single—and so far the only—documented case: an unfortunate twenty-three-year-old man who was urinating in knee-deep water. Here are the facts: There are a number of species of candiru, some up to sixteen inches long, others tiny. All of them are catfish and have specialized to become parasites. They usually lodge in other fishes’ gill openings and feed on their blood. They will also infest human corpses, and body openings (as vultures know well) are always a good point of entry—which might be the way the stories started.

A stingray, with its poisonous spine, lies mostly hidden under the sand.