Ogaliku (Ogalik)

Stickleback. Despite the importance of sticklebacks to the development of ethology, the street this name was given to in 1995 was gutted six years later. Then, adding insult to injury, they gave it to another street and, less than 12 weeks later, binned it again! What have they got against sticklebacks? They don’t even have Raudkiisk (cf. Kiisa), the sea stickleback or, is it’s known in Ireland, 15-spined stickleback, only true marine Gasterostid, so lovingly linnaeanized as Spinachia spinachia (raud = iron > spinach, Popeye...). All wrong of course: spinach, originally ‘Spanish vegetable’, actually contains less available iron than cauliflower. The story has it that, way back in the 1870s, a certain German Dr. E von Wolf published a paper giving spinach’s iron content as 10 times higher than it was due to a misplaced decimal point. Maybe, but the certain German Doktor has proved remarkably elusive and the whole thing may well be an urban legend, perhaps cooked up to exculpate the Sailor Man’s creators for their blathering nonsense. Either way, a tricky piece of greenery. As the decidedly odd US lawyer Clarence Darrow once said: “I don’t like spinach, and I’m glad I don’t, because if I liked it I’d eat it, and I just hate it”. The stickleback (or tittlebat as Pickwick would call the three-spined variety) is a noble fish, a close relative to the sea-horse and scaleless as a dolphin, it is a nest-builder and tender wetnurse of relatively cuddly sticklebabies cynically abandoned by an uncaring mother. See Maimu.

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