17 February: Sardines

The first sardines were canned by Julius Wolff in Eastport, Maine at the Wolff and Reesing Cannery on this date in 1876. 10 facts about sardines

1. The term sardine relates to various species of small Fish in the herring family. There are five distinct genera and at least 21 unique species in the sub-order they belong to. The European pilchard is one of them. Hence the words sardine and pilchard are sometimes used interchangeably.

2. Most sources will tell you that the word sardine comes from the Italian island of Sardinia, because the fish were once abundant there. Wikipedia, however, questions this as the word has Greek roots and it seems unlikely that people in Athens were getting their fish from Sardinia that long ago. Their article suggests an alternative, that the word sardine actually derives from sardonyx stone, because the flesh of some of these fish is Red, like the stone.

3. In ancient times, sardines were preserved through methods such as drying, smoking, and salting. These methods were less than perfect, however, as they would alter the texture and taste.

4. While Wolff might have been the pioneer for sardine canning in America, the credit in my sources seems to go to one Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner and chef, who discovered that heating food in a sealed container would preserve it. He has been called the "Father of Canning."

5. Situations where people are crowded together are sometimes referred to as being like sardines in a tin. This expression seems to have originated in France: "encaissés comme des sardines", appeared in a French publication called La Femme, le mari, et l'amant in 1829, and the English translation in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction in 1841.

6. On a similar note, the game of sardines. One person hides, and the people who find them hide with them in the same spot, so by the end of the game they will be packed together in the hiding place like sardines in a tin. The last person to discover the hiding place is the next one to hide.

7. A can of sardines is 67% Water, 21% protein, 10% fat with a small amount of carbohydrate. Sardines are an excellent source of Selenium, Calcium and omega 3 fatty acids.

8. Sardines eat zooplankton and will congregate in areas where there is lots of it. Sardines are eaten not only by us but by other fish, marine animals and Birds. They are in fact quite low in the food chain which makes them not only a sustainable source of food, but one which has less contaminants, like Mercury, than fish higher up the chain.

9. Sardine oil has other uses besides as food. It has anti-inflammatory properties and is rich in vitamin A, which makes it good for Skin care products. It can be used to treat skin problems such as eczema and acne.

10. Portugal is known for its sardines and The annual Feast of St. Anthony there features a parade of giant sardines made of paper or plastic, which are carried through the streets of Lisbon. Each year, the parade has a different theme, and the design of the giant sardines will be in keeping with the theme.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

10 June: Koi

This week is Carp Week, so here are some facts about koi, a member of the carp family.

1. Koi are a brightly coloured form of the species Amur carp (Cyprinus rubrofuscus), which were selectively bred for their colours in Japan during the early 19^th century.

2. In Japan, they are called nishikigoi, which literally means "brocaded carp".

3. Koi is also similar in sound to the Japanese word for love, so they are a symbol of friendship in Japan. In Japanese symbolism koi have many more positive meanings including Luck, prosperity and perseverance in the face of adversity.

4. The colours they come in are White, Black, Red, Yellow, Blue, and cream. Metallic shades of gold and platinum in the scales have also been developed through selective breeding. A black koi is said to be especially lucky.

5. Butterfly koi, longfin koi, or dragon carp were developed in the 1980s and are notable for their long and flowing fins.

6. Koi are distant cousins of Goldfish and it can be hard to distinguish a young koi from a goldfish. They can even interbreed, although their offspring will be sterile.

7. The average lifespan of a koi is 40 years, although they have been known to live much longer. In 1974, studying the growth rings on the scales of a koi named Hanako revealed that she was 226 years old.

8. They can grow quite large as well. Koi enthusiast Geoff Lawton bought one which was four feet long, the largest koi ever recorded. He called her Big Girl.

9. If you want to keep koi as pets, you’ll need a deep pond. A pond at least 8 feet in depth is recommended so that the fish can experience different temperatures, and won’t completely freeze in winter. Each individual will need 250 gallons of Water. A deep pond will also mean that wading birds like herons can’t stand there and eat them. A high overhang will stop next door’s Cat or other predatory mammals from getting them. Also, koi can get sunburn, so you’ll need plants like Water lilies, water lettuce, and water hyacinth in the pond as well.

10. They are also highly intelligent and can be trained to ring a bell for food and eat from their owner’s hand. They’re clever enough to recognise the person who feeds them.

Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)

Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.

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13 December: Seahorses

Today is the National day of the Seahorse. 10 things you might not know about seahorses:

1. Seahorses belong to the Family Syngnathidae which also includes seadragons and pipefish. The genus is Hippocampus, which translates to something like ‘Horse animal’. The word Hippocampus is also used for the human Brain.

2. It may be that seahorses evolved from pipefish. Tectonic changes in the earth, resulted in shallower waters in which sea grasses could grow. Sea grasses grow upwards to reach the light of the Sun, so the seahorse’s vertical posture could be an adaptation to living in this environment.

3. Although they are fish, they don’t swim all that well. In fact, the dwarf seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae) holds the title of being the slowest fish in the sea. Seahorses use their dorsal fin to move through the Water. To move up and down, they adjust the volume of air in a tiny pocket inside their body, called a ‘swim bladder’.

4. They don’t have teeth or stomachs. Food passes through them very quickly and so they have to eat at least 30 meals a day to absorb enough nutrients.

5. They catch their prey by ambush. Not only can they hide in weeds and grasses, they can also change colour to match their surroundings. When an unsuspecting prey animal such as small shrimps, pass by, the seahorse uses its tube-like mouth to suck it in.

6. Seahorse mates may stay together for several years. They have even been observed linking tails which could be their equivalent of holding hands.

7. Now for the one everyone knows – the males give birth. The females produce the eggs, and need time to recover after each batch. The female seahorse injects the eggs into the male’s brood pouch, which is a bit like the pouch of a Kangaroo, and he incubates up to 2,000 eggs and fry for up to 45 days and then ejects them. The baby seahorses are then left to look after themselves. He is immediately ready for another batch of eggs and his mate has had time to recover from the last lot and produce more. Hence it’s the most efficient way for them to reproduce.

8. Satomi’s pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus satomiae) is the smallest species of seahorse at just 14mm long.

9. Their eyes work independently of each other so they can look backwards and forwards at the same time.

10. Two species of seahorse can be found in coastal waters off the UK and Ireland – the Spiny Seahorse and the Short Snouted Seahorse.

A Very Variant Christmas

Last year, Jade and Gloria were embroiled in a bitter conflict to win back their throne and their ancestral home. This year, Queen Jade and Princess Gloria want to host the biggest and best Christmas party ever in their palace. They invite all their friends to come and bring guests. Not even the birth of Jade's heir just before Christmas will stop them.

The guest list includes most of Britain's complement of super-powered crime-fighters, their families and friends. What could possibly go wrong?

Gatecrashers, unexpected arrivals, exploding Christmas crackers and a kidnapping, for starters.

Far away in space, the Constellations, a cosmic peacekeeping force, have suffered a tragic loss. They need to recruit a new member to replace their dead colleague. The two top candidates are both at Jade and Gloria's party. The arrival of the recruitment delegation on Christmas Eve is a surprise for everyone; but their visit means one guest now faces a life-changing decision.

Meanwhile, an alliance of the enemies of various guests at the party has infiltrated the palace; they hide in the dungeon, plotting how best to get rid of the crime-fighters and the royal family once and for all. Problem is, they all have their own agendas and differences of opinion on how to achieve their aims.

Not to mention that this year, the ghosts who walk the corridors of the palace on Christmas Eve will be as surprised by the living as the living are by them.

Themes 

Christmas; superheroes; reunions; parties; life choices; shocking surprises; mistaken identity; kidnap and rescue.

Reasons not to read it

• It's a bit short. You could probably read it in one sitting.
• Most of the action takes place at a Christmas party. In a palace.
• It's all about Christmas but there doesn't seem to be a schmaltzy moral message.
• There are a couple of babies and some small children in it - and one nearly gets eaten.
• Santa appears in it, but he isn't really Santa.
• Superheroes. Again.
• Not to mention a whole bunch of super-villains. Again all new ones and not the ones we know from Marvel or DC.

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10 June: Goldfish

This week is Carp Week, so here are some facts about a member of the carp family, the goldfish.

1. Goldfish are native to China. Wild goldfish are silver or Grey but a common genetic mutation produces a Yellow, gold or Orange colour. They were bred for food in China but selective breeding for colour was first recorded in Imperial China, during the Jin dynasty (266–420).

2. By law, the yellow variety could only be owned by the imperial family because yellow was their colour. This is in part why orange goldfish are more common.

3. In 17^th century Europe, goldfish were seen as a symbol of good fortune, and it was traditional for a man to give his wife a goldfish on their first anniversary as a symbol of prosperity to come.

4. In the US, the popularity of pet goldfish came about after the U.S. Commission on Fisheries in Washington DC received an import of Japanese goldfish in 1878 and decided to give them away as a publicity stunt. D.C. residents could submit requests for bowls of goldfish. At the program's peak, 20,000 pets were handed out a year. At one point, a third of all households in the city owned a government-provided goldfish.

5. The scientific name for a goldfish is Carassius auratus, and a group of them is known as “a troubling,” not a school.

6. Wild goldfish typically grow to between 4.7 inches (12 cm) and 8.7 inches (22 cm) but can reach 16 inches (41 cm). Pet goldfish, if they are well cared for and kept in the best conditions, can grow even bigger. In 2008 a goldfish measuring 19 inches (48 cm) was recorded in the Netherlands. In the UK, the largest goldfish was Goldie, kept as a pet in Folkestone. Goldie measured 15 inches (38 cm) and weighed over 2 pounds (0.91 kg), and was named the second largest goldfish in the world.

7. There’s a myth about goldfish that they don’t live very long. This might arise from the fact that if they’re not properly cared for they tend to die young. Treat them right and they can live to be over 40 years old. The oldest recorded goldfish was called Tish, originally a carnival prize. Tish was 43 years old when she died in 1999.

8. While on the subject of carnival prizes, the use of goldfish as prizes is banned in Rome. Italy also has a law against keeping goldfish in small bowls.

9. Another myth you might have heard about goldfish is that they have very short memories, something like three seconds. This isn’t true. Being so widely available, they’ve been extensively studied and have been found to be able to remember things for at least three months. Studies have also shown that they can distinguish between individual humans and even different classical composers.

10. They can survive in anoxic conditions for a short time, especially in low temperatures, which scientists believe may be an adaptation to help them survive in frozen ponds in winter.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

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4 March: Fish

The current astrological sign is Pisces, which is a good enough excuse to present you with ten facts about fish:

1. There are approximately 32,000 different species of fish in the world, with more being discovered all the time. This is more than all the other kinds of vertebrates combined.

2. However, starfish, Jellyfish, shellfish, Crayfish/crawfish and cuttlefish are not actually fish. Their names derive from Old English from a time when every fully aquatic animal was deemed to be a fish.

3. The biggest fish in the world is the giant Whale shark, which can grow to nearly 60 feet, while the smallest is the Photocorynus spiniceps, a type of angler fish. The males are only 6.2 millimeters long.

4. As a fish grows, it doesn’t get more scales. The scales it has grow with it, and so it’s possible to tell how old a fish is by counting the rings on its scales.

5. Sharks are the only fish with eyelids, therefore the only fish that can blink.

6. The fastest moving fish is the sailfish, which can travel as fast as a car, and the slowest is the Dwarf Seahorse, which takes about one hour to travel five feet.

7. Fish don’t have vocal chords but they can make noises to communicate with each other. They rattle their bones, gnash their teeth or vibrate muscles against their swim bladders.

8. Fish have better memories and are more intelligent than we tend to give them credit for. Fish can recognise humans which feed them. Cleaner fish know the fish they regularly clean, which could be up to 100 individuals. The client fish, in turn, recognise individual cleaners. Fish can also learn how to use tools. Some use rocks to crack open bivalves such as clams, Oysters and mussels. Archerfish are able to learn how to shoot jets of water at insects above them by watching other archerfish do it. Fish can also remember Music; one group of researchers fed their fish while playing a specific song before releasing them into the wild. Five months later, the fish returned when the song was played at sea.

9. The only type of fish which can swim backwards are Eels.

10. The word for a large number of fish swimming together is a school. The movement of a school is controlled by the fish in the middle.

9 June: Carp

The second week in June is National Carp Week. 10 things you might not know about carp:

1. They are a freshwater fish belonging to the Cyprinidae family. They are related to goldfish, koi and minnows.
2. A common carp can interbreed with goldfish. The result is called a Kollar carp.
3. Carp are native to Europe and Asia, including the Black Sea, Caspian Sea and Aral Sea. Because they were an important food fish, they have been introduced all over the world except for the poles. However, in the USA and Australia they are now considered an invasive species.
4. The Romans used to farm carp near the delta of the Danube River in Romania. The farming techniques were also used by monks throughout Europe between the 13th and 16th centuries.
5. Although tolerant of most conditions, common carp prefer to live in large bodies of slow or standing Water and soft, vegetative sediments. It is because they stir up mud at the bottom of rivers and streams, thus making them dirty, that they are considered to be pests.
6. Traditionally, anglers weren't particularly interested in carp because they didn't believe they'd be much of a challenge to catch, unlike Trout. Hence they were classified as “trash fish”. In time, however, a few anglers realised that they were actually quite tricky to catch and began calling them “freshwater bonefish.”
7. A female carp can lay 300,000 eggs in a single spawn. They spawn in the spring as a rule, but can, if conditions are favourable, spawn several times a year. Hence one carp can lay over a million eggs in a year. Only a tiny proportion of these will survive to adulthood though as they are preyed upon by many other creatures including other fish such as the northern pike and largemouth bass, cormorants, herons, goosanders, and ospreys) and mammals such as Otter and mink.
8. Humans eat them too, although they are less popular as food in Western Europe and America than in Eastern Europe and China. In Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria, parts of Germany and Poland, carp is traditionally eaten on Christmas Eve, either fried or made into soup. It's fairly common for a family to keep a live carp in a Bathtub before killing it to eat, because this is supposed to make it taste less muddy. This is discouraged nowadays, however, because it is likely to cause unnecessary suffering to the fish, and the fish might fight back and injure someone.
9. Common carp can eat a herbivorous diet of aquatic plants, but prefer to scavenge for insects, crustaceans, crawfish, and worms.
10. Carp are fairly long lived, if they can escape being made into Christmas Eve dinner. They can also grow quite large. Wild adults reach weights of 30 or 40 lbs and a length of 1-2 feet, but farmed ones can grow even bigger. A carp weighing in at 91lb was caught in France in 2017.

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• Superheroes
• Psychic detectives
• Romance
• Alternative dimensions
• Time travel 
• Secrets
• Friendship
• Family relationships
• Ghosts
• Adventure
• Crime

If you want to read about superheroes who aren't the usual Marvel/DC staples, who don't all live in the USA.

If you like quirky tales.

If you like to support independent self published authors.

Check out my books page.

30 August: International Whale Shark Day

• Today is International Whale Shark Day and has been since 2008 when it was decided by delegates at the International Whale Shark Conference in Isla Holbox that there should be a day for promoting awareness about these creatures and their conservation. Here are 10 facts about whale sharks.

1. The scientific name for whale sharks is Rhincodon typus.
2. They are not related to Whales – they are a type of shark. They get that name because they are huge – as big as some whales. In fact, they are the biggest type of fish in the sea and indeed, the biggest animal that isn’t a whale. They can grow to over 40 feet/12m long and can weigh over 20 tons/907kg. They may be big but they’re not dangerous to humans. They’re quite docile and have even been known to let swimmers and divers hitch a ride.
3. They are filter feeders, which means they sieve plankton through their gills, along with small fish and eggs. Hence they are passively eating whenever they are moving. 6,000 litres/1,300 gallons of Water can pass through their gills every hour. At times, if food is particularly plentiful, they can feed more actively by opening their mouths. A whale shark’s mouth can stretch over 1 meter/4 feet wide.
4. Most sharks have 20 to 30 rows of teeth. Whale sharks have more than 300 rows. That’s around 3,000 teeth. Their teeth aren’t very big – less than 6mm/0.2in long.
5. Scientists don’t know for sure how long they live, but guess at 70-100 years. They reach sexual maturity at about 30 years of age. When it comes to making baby whale sharks, the mother has two wombs (as all sharks do) which can hold hundreds of developing embryos, which are born live, though not necessarily all at the same time. Baby whale sharks are 16 to 24 inches/40-60cm long. The smallest whale shark ever found was 15 inches/38cm long, found with its tail tied to a stake at a beach in Pilar, Philippines. It was released into the wild.
6. Female whale sharks aren’t great mothers – they leave their young to fend for themselves. While the adults don’t have many natural enemies due to their immense size, the babies are quite vulnerable. Only about 10% of them survive to become the size of a bus. Hence, they have evolved to grow pretty fast. A juvenile whale shark may eat 21kg/46 pounds of plankton a day.
7. They don’t swim especially fast – their top speed is around 5km/3 miles per hour, but they can cover huge distances. In three years, a single whale shark can travel 8,000 miles/1300km or more. They’ve been known to gather in large numbers at certain places like the Galapagos Islands and Yucatan Peninsula in summer for a plankton feast.
8. They have thick skin. The hide on their backs can be 4 inches/10cm thick and is covered in hard scales called denticles. They can clench the muscles under the skin to make their skin even thicker. Their bellies, however, are relatively soft so they have been observed to turn their bellies away from human divers.
9. Each whale shark has a unique pattern of white dots behind their gills. In Madagscar, the word for a while shark is marokintana, meaning “many stars”. Hence it’s possible, though not necessarily easy, to recognise individuals. Whale shark experts have teamed up with NASA to make this task easier. NASA has developed pattern recognition software to identify star clusters, called the Groth algorithm, which can be adapted to identify individual whale sharks and try to get a handle on their migration habits. If you’ve ever photographed a whale shark, and captured its dots on film, you might be able to help. ECOCEAN is an Australian organisation which runs the largest whale shark identification programme on earth. If you send them a copy of your photo, along with details of where the images were taken, they can run it through the algorithm to see if it matches any other whale sharks they have on record. If it does, they’ll e-mail you a summary of where else that particular shark has been spotted (so to speak).
10. The Philippine 100-peso bill and the Maldivian 1000 rufiyaa note both feature whale sharks.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

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2 July: Mullet Day

2 July is Mullet Day.

10 things you didn’t know about mullets.

1. It’s a type of fish of the family Muglidae. There are about 78 species including Grey mullets and Red mullets.
2. These fish are known for their ability to leap out of the Water. Why they do it is a matter of debate among scientists, but it may be so they can absorb extra Oxygen. They also do it to escape predators.
3. Outside of Europe, they are also known as goatfish.
4. It’s also a hairstyle, where the hair is cut short at the front and sides but left long at the back. The word “Mullet” to describe this kind of hairstyle has actually only been in use since the 1990s by the Beastie Boys, who used the term “mullet heads” in a song. “Mullet head” was previously only used as a term to describe people who were somewhat dim.
5. While the name “mullet” for the hairstyle is relatively new, the style itself is not. It’s been around since the sixth century. It was a fashion then for young Byzantine men, and was known at that time as “the Hunnic look”.
6. In the 1970s there were some big pop stars wearing mullets – David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Paul McCartney, for example.
7. In the 1990s even Superman sported a mullet for a while. After being killed off in the DC comics in 1992, when he came back from the dead in 1993 he had a mullet. There was to be a film, Superman Lives, in which the Man of Steel was to be depicted with a mullet, but it was cancelled.
8. A hairstyle which is long at the front and short at the back is known as a tellum (mullet spelled backwards).
9. The style was banned in Iran in the 2010s for being an un-Islamic, decadent Western hairstyle.
10. Mullet is also a village in Albania.

MY LATEST BOOK!

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

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June 25: National Catfish Day

Today is National Catfish Day, so here are ten things you might not know about catfish.

1. Catfish get their name from the barbels around their mouths which resemble a Cat’s whiskers. That said, there are some species of catfish which don’t have them.
2. The order they belong to, the Siluriformes, is one of the most diverse orders on the planet. It contains 36 families with over 3,000 different species. 1 out of every 20 vertebrate species is a catfish. Not only that, but scientists are continually discovering new ones. Between 2003 and 2005, over 100 species were named, including an entire new family.
3. As you might expect, then, catfish can be found virtually everywhere. They live inland and in coastal waters of every continent except Antarctica. They can live in temperatures from just above freezing to nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
4. There is even a type of catfish which lives in swamps, ponds and slow moving or stagnant water which has a tendency to dry up. This fish is called the walking catfish (Clarias batrachus), because it has evolved the ability to “walk” (or more accurately, wiggle) so that if the pond it is living in dries up it can move to another.
5. They also vary considerably in size. The three largest species are the Mekong giant catfish, the Wels catfish and the Piraiba catfish. The largest catfish ever recorded was a giant Mekong catfish caught in Thailand in 2005 that weighed 293 kilograms (646 lb). At the other end of the scale are the Trichomycteridae are a family of catfishes commonly known as pencil catfishes or parasitic catfishes, which can measure just 1cm. This family includes the candiru fish (Vandellia cirrhosa), which is said to have a habit of swimming up the human urethra.
6. They don’t have scales. Instead they have smooth, mucus covered skin. Some species breathe through their skin; they all taste with their skin, having thousands of taste buds all over their bodies so they can detect chemicals in the Water around them.
7. Their diets also vary considerably. In general, they eat insects, Snails, other fish and fish eggs, but there are some types which eat wood and algae and others which are parasitic and live off the Blood of other animals. Some will eat waste and decaying material from the sea or river bottom. There are some which people keep as pets, as they help keep the tank clean, although their diet needs to be supplemented with ordinary fish food as well.
8. Catfish can communicate with one another. One characteristic of the species is an organ called the Weberian apparatus, which not only allows them to make a variety of sounds, but also improves their hearing and ability to discriminate between sounds. They also rub parts of their bodies together to make even more different sounds.
9. They have a number of nicknames, especially in the USA where they are known as mud cats, polliwogs, chuckleheads, big bullheads, shovelheads, scoopers and flatties, to name but a few regional nicknames.
10. They are mostly harmless but some have stings and need to be handled with care. Most of the stings aren’t venomous but stings from striped eel catfish have been known to be fatal in rare cases.

MY LATEST BOOK!

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book

1 September: Trout

The French Revolutionary Calendar celebrated Trout on 1 September. Here are ten things you might not know about trout.

1. Humans have been fishing for trout for at least a couple of thousand years. The first person to write about trout fishing was Claudius Aelianus in 200AD. He described fishermen using flies to catch them in Macedonia.
2. The earliest known writings about how to fish for trout was written in the 15th century by an Austrian priest called Leonardus Haslinger, who jotted down some fly fishing techniques in the back of his prayer book.
3. There are about 50 sub-species of the brown trout.
4. Their eyesight is excellent. They are able to focus their eyes in several directions at once, which may be one reason they can be a challenge for anglers.
5. The trout's diet consists of insects, fish, leeches and worms. They've even been known to eat Frogs and mice. Anything they can find, basically. They spend 80% of their time foraging for food.
6. Newly hatched trout are known as fingerlings.
7. As food, they are classified as oily fish. They are rich in protein and a good source of vitamins B1, B6, B3, B12 and D. They also contain essential minerals such as Potassium, manganese and selenium.
8. You can tell how old a trout is by counting the rings on their scales, as new growth is added around the edges.
9. A trout has almost twice as many chromosomes as we do (we have 23, a trout has 40).
10. The most recent biggest trout ever caught record I found was from 2013 - it weighed 42lb 1oz and was caught in New Zealand by Otwin Kandolf.

NEW!

Obsidian's Ark

Teenage years bring no end of problems. Daniel Moran's include getting hold of computer games his parents don't think he should have; a full blown crush on the beautiful Suki from Zorostan; maintaining his status as a prefect and getting his homework done. He must also keep from his parents and sister the fact that he is a superhero with a sword from another world.

Trish wonders how to get science whizz Tom to notice her; how to persuade him that the best way to stand up to the school bully is to fight back. She doesn't want her friends, especially not Tom, to know she is a genetic variant with superpowers. Little does she know that Tom has secrets of his own.

Suki struggles to make friends at school when she cannot understand everyday cultural references, and they all suspect her of being a terrorist. She, too, has a secret, but is it what her classmates assume?

When Daniel stumbles upon a plot by an alliance of supervillains to plunge the world into war, he tries to alert the established superheroes, but none of them believe him. When the Prime Minister's only daughter, Yasmin Miller, is abducted, Daniel knows the villains' plan is underway. It seems humanity's only hope may be Daniel and the ragtag bunch of teenage superheroes he recruits. Can he pull together, not only his own team, but the older heroes as well, in a bid to save the Earth from a devastating war?

Themes: 

Superheroes; Coming of age; Leadership; Kidnap and rescue; Aliens; Friendship and rivalry; Terrorism; Secrets.

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