Purple Oil Catfish

CD Catfish (Tim Vogelaar and Joel Smythe for “Nashville Catfish out of Water”)

I suspect that ever since the color of the year was announced to be radiant orchid, my readers have only been asking themselves one question: “Are there any purple catfish?”  There are many imaginary purple catfish in the arts and in fantasy (and in a world of fluorescent lights, all sorts of things can take on a lavender hint), but there is also a real purple catfish!  Native to the clear flowing streams of Guyana, here is Centromochlus reticulatus, also known as the purple oil catfish or the driftwood cat.

Centromochlus reticulatus (image from msjinkzd)

Centromochlus reticulatus is a shy and retiring catfish which likes to hide by day in driftwood and come out at night to feed on whatever tiny invertebrates or other foodstuffs they can find.  The adult fish are extremely tiny and measure only 1 inch (2.7 cm) in length.  Like many little catfish, the fish may be shy and nocturnal but they are also social and friendly with each other.  Indeed aquarists report that they can sometimes be seen coming out to feed in little pseudo-schools where they frisk and dance in happiness at being together. Their most distinctive traits are the handsome honeycomb spots on their backs, their long whiskers, and cute all-black eyes (which are covered in adipose tissue and “lack orbital rims”).   Because they are so furtive, their wild range is somewhat unclear: although they are most common in Guyana’s Rupunun River, they reputedly also live in various nearby South American waterways (including the northeastern tributaries of the mighty Amazon).

Young Centromochlus reticulatus

The little fish are not exactly a Pantone dream color: younger fish are a demure purple/pink (although in older specimens the purple may fade somewhat).  And yet I find the tiny lavender catfish to be very endearing.

Advertisement

Cerise

Cerise is a vibrant pinkish shade of red. The color is uniquely lovely–particularly as a glowing light against a dark backdrop, and the name has a long history (having been used to describe that particular shade of red since the middle of the 19^th century). Unfortunately there isn’t as much to write about cerise as about some other colors.

Cerise means cherry in French and I thought it would be appropriate to write about the color as cherry-picking season arrives. When I was a teenager, my parents dragged me to an orchard to pick cherries around the end of June every year. I was always aggrieved to be rousted from bed first thing on a Saturday morning and I treated the annual event as an ordeal–but now I miss cherry picking and I particularly miss having cherries.  The very beautiful ornamental cherry tree in the back yard of where I live is an ornamental cherry which produces no fruit.  Aside from a few tiny plastic containers of pricey bing cherries, I have to be content with the color.

A National Geographic Painting of the Collision

The name “Cerise” has one other claim to fame.  In 1995, the French military launched a spy satellite of that name from Centre Spatial Guyanais (the ESA spaceport in French Guiana which now includes the infamous former penal colony of Devil’s Island) in order to monitor high frequency radio transmissions.  One year later, Cerise was struck by a fragment of an Ariane rocket.  To quote NASA, “The debris appeared to have impacted the stabilization boom, which extended 6 m from the main body of the spacecraft, at over 14 km/s (31,000 miles/hour).”  It was the first recorded space collision of a space craft with space junk (although not the last). Incredibly, the satellite remained operational however the boom broke off and joined the tens of thousands of other bits of space debris–lethal low hanging fruit whipping through near-Earth orbit.