Small Shelly Fauna

The Fish

Model organisms: there's no escaping them. You think you're safe at home, sequestered away in your hidey-holes, free from the beady little eyes of Mus musculus and Drosophila melanogaster, the probing roots of Arabidopsis thaliana and the, um...wormy stuff of Caenorhabditis elegans. But, as you go to check your mailbox, BAM! Zebrafish! Outta nowhere. In my case, these weren't actual zebrafish (though I wouldn't put it past the lil' buggers), but rather, a pamphlet advertising a new journal simply entitled Zebrafish. At first, I couldn't believe that Danio rerio got an entire journal devoted to it. There are some pretty specific journals out there, but very few are focused around a single species (excepting that freakjob Homo sapiens.) I guess I should have seen this coming, though. Zebrafish are hot stuff, the latest "big thing" in genomics and developmental biology. And we hate them for it. "We" being ichthyologists, or at least a select cabal of students of ichthyology. Seriously, they get model organism status and it goes straight to their heads. To the point where they're not even called "zebrafish" anymore, just "The Fish" (like C. elegans is "The Worm.") As if they were the only fish on Earth. Well, let me clue you, partner, you're not! And furthermore, as far as I'm concerned, you're not even worthy of the fish name anymore. You're deader to me than an acanthodian. Your membership in Osteichthyes is officially revoked. What's that, you say, you've got more than enough synapomorphies to qualify? Oh, I'm sure that the folks in genetics can mutate them out of you. Don't let the door hit you on the caudal fin on the way out. I hope you have lots of fun with your new friends! Yeah, I bet you'll have reeeeal good times with those little winged maggot factories whose ranks you're joining.

Now, I know several zebrafish workers. They're good people, able researchers who've done some really amazing studies. I don't begrudge them their model organism. But I just want it to know that if it EVER shows its face at an ASIH meeting again, blood will be spilled.

My personal beef with D. rerio aside, there is an important issue associated with the publication of a zebrafish-specific journal, and that's the increasing ghettoization of scientific subdisciplines. There are both pros and cons to having journals with an extremely limited focus. The pros are, of course, that if you're a worker in that subfield, you know exactly where to go for the latest work and exactly what publisher's pages to check every week. Also, you've got a go-to forum for submission of your own work. The con is that only a handful of people know what's going on in your field, and that's a recipe for stagnation. And, the more focused the journal the greater this problem will be. So, at what point does a journal pass the point of average, useful specificity to ridiculousness? I can't say for sure, but I think Zebrafish has passed it and kept on running. On the other end of the spectrum, however, there's no limit to how broad a journal can be to still be useful. Believe it or not, I've actually heard people complain about how Nature and Science are too broad in scope to be worth reading every week. To this I can only say, "Guh?" There isn't an avenue of study around that can't be improved by a little input from other disciplines. If your own research has never been augmented by something in a completely isolated field, you're either asking the wrong questions or being a fool.

Just as big a fool, I might add, as Oryzias will be if it doesn't stop hanging around with the evo-devo crowd. Don't make me excommunicate you, too, man. We used to be tight.