brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

It’s one of the golden rules of the natural world – birds live in trees, fish live in water.

The trouble is, no one bothered to tell the mangrove killifish.

Scientists have discovered that it spends several months of every year out of the water and living inside trees.

Adaptable: The killifish can alter the way it breathes

Hidden away inside rotten branches and trunks, the remarkable creatures temporarily alter their biological makeup so they can breathe air.

Biologists studying the killifish say they astonished it can cope for so long out of its natural habitat.

The discovery, along with its ability to breed without a mate, must make the mangrove killifish, Rivulus marmoratus Poey, one of the oddest fish known to man.

Around two inches long, they normally live in muddy pools and the flooded burrows of crabs in the mangrove swamps of Florida, Latin American and Caribbean.

The latest discovery was made by biologists wading through swamps in Belize and Florida who found hundreds of killifish hiding out of the water in the rotting branches and trunks of trees.

The fish had flopped their way to their new homes when their pools of water around the roots of mangroves dried up. Inside the logs, they were lined up end to end along tracks carved out by insects.

Dr Scott Taylor of the Brevard County Environmentally Endangered Lands Programme in Florida admitted the creatures were a little odd.

“They really don’t meet standard behavioural criteria for fish,” he told New Scientist magazine.

Although the cracks inside logs make a perfect hiding place, conditions can be cramped. The fish – which are usually fiercely territorial – are forced to curb their aggression.

Another study, published earlier this year, revealed how they alter their bodies and metabolism to cope with life out of water.

Their gills are altered to retain water and nutrients, while they excrete nitrogen waste through their skin.

These changes are reversed as soon as they return to the water.

Previously their biggest claim to fame was that they are the only known vertebrate – animal with a backbone – to reproduce without the need for a mate.

Killifish can develop both female and male sexual organs, and fertilise their eggs while they are still in the body, laying tiny embryos into the water.

They are not the only fish able to breathe air. The walking catfish of South-east Asia has gills that allow it to breathe in air and in water.

The climbing perch of India can suffocate in water unless it can also gulp in air.

In 2004 Leonardo di Caprio took a holiday to Belize’s Cayo Espanto Island Resort with then girlfriend, Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen. He loved the island an Belize so much that in July 2005 he bought the 106 acre (41.6ha) Blackadore Caye just a few miles west of Ambergris Caye for a reputed price of $1.75 million.

The island is two miles long, with beaches either sided dotted with coconut palms dipping into the surrounding tropical waters. At that time (over two years ago) he planned to develop the island into an environmentally friendly, albeit luxury resort using renewable energy resources, but nothing happened until recently.

Now it has been announced that Di Caprio has agreed to partner with the Four Seasons Resorts chain to create a ‘green hotel’ on the island. The plans will include several exclusive villas, private pools and direct access to the beach. The development will be as environmentally sensitive as possible, respecting the islands tropical vegetation and wildlife. Di Caprio is heavily involved in environmental concerns, and his environmental film on the human impact on the environment “The 11th Hour” has just come out.
Ambergris Today in Belize states that he is planning to sell lots at the island to other Hollywood stars and celebrities, including Robert DeNiro and Tiger Woods.

If Di Caprio’s island dream comes true, he will find himself competing for business with “The Brando” a deluxe private getaway being developed on Marlon Brando’s former island of Te’tiaroa in Tahiti, and also due to open in 2008.

San Pedro is a tourist mecca known for its night life along “Front Street” (not the official name, which the locals never use), water sports, and its long coral reef, popular with divers.

There’s a dark side, however. Belize is a very dangerous place, among the top ten countries worldwide for homicide. You can literally shoot someone in the street and the police will do nothing because they are so low paid that they’re unwilling to risk their lives chasing bad guys. They only act when there’s a mass killing, such as happens with great regularity between rival drug gangs.

San Pedro has long stretches of sparsely inhabited sand dunes. These contain private docks for “cigarette” speedboats laden with drugs making their way from South America to Miami. The dealers stop off for the night, and sell whatever they can locally. At least a third of the locals are crackheads, and tourists are continually panhandled and occasionally assaulted by crazed druggies looking for money. Another third of the locals are hookers who work the tourists; many of them under 16. AIDS is an epidemic in Belize, and it is rampant in San Pedro.

The local government — and the national government as well — is corrupt from the very top to the very bottom. It is no secret that in San Pedro you can get a driver’s license in ten minutes for a $100 bribe, but it takes months if you go through “channels”. The Traffic Department is not only corrupt, but inept as well. The only person who actually knows how to do something there is away from her full time job most of the time, working as a DJ at a local watering hole. If you are in San Pedro and get in trouble, the only honest government officials on the island are the people who work in Immigration; they are serious and very proud of their jobs. Go to them in an emergency, but if you listen to me, you shouldn’t be in Belize in the first place.

Another place to go if you get in trouble in San Pedro is any hardware store. All the hardware stores in San Pedro are owned by a tightly knit social group of Arabs — some of them related — who have been so oppressed in their native countires that they have deep sympathy for people on the run from corrupt governments or who find themselves down and out through no fault of their own. They will definitely help you whatever your needs are. They know how to deal with the local government if you need to get something done.

For years, Belize City has had an unsavoury reputation for drug-running, money-laundering and muggings.

With tourism now in mind, the government is working hard to improve its image.

Straddling a creek on Central America’s Caribbean coast, Belize City feels more West Indian than Latin.

That is not just because a majority of the population of 50,000 plus is black, and speaks English.

The town is said to be built on foundations made of ship’s ballast and empty rum bottles, left by 18th Century British traders, who came to extract timber from the forests upriver.

You can still see the sleeping quarters underneath the grander gingerbread houses, where African slaves used to be chained up for the night.

The town’s main drag, south of the swing-bridge that is Belize City’s major point of reference, is called Regent Street, though it could be a million miles from the smart London thoroughfare after which it was named.

Makeover – Old Warnings

“Do not wander off the main streets.”

“Always take a taxi from the bus station.”

“Carry some dollars in an easily accessible place, so you can just hand them over if someone pulls a gun on you.”

Belize was the last British colony to survive on the American mainland.

Over the years, I had been given so many dire warnings about Belize City that I had studiously avoided it on earlier travels round Central America.

But then more recently I had heard that the government was cleaning the place up, in an effort to boost Belize’s tourist trade.

A visitor stands out a mile in Belize City, as the humidity and the temperatures are so high that you are a dripping wreck before you have walked 200 yards.

The locals, in contrast, saunter or cycle by in immaculately dry and ironed shirts, even the cheeky schoolboys who regularly stop to try and beg a dollar.

You quickly learn to walk on the shady side of the street. And you make regular pit-stops at cooler buildings, such as St. John’s Cathedral, at the bottom of Albert Street. The cathedral is made out of curious grey bricks that were, like the city’s foundations, brought here as ship’s ballast.

Painted on a board outside, there is an earnest exhortation in Spanish: “Hoy, no manana” – today, not tomorrow.

The locals do not exactly give the impression of having taken this message to heart.

New money

North of the swing-bridge, past a smart but anonymous shopping centre that is designed to cater for the burgeoning cruise ship trade, there is a part of town more open to sea-breezes.

The huge hotel lobby has 500 slot machines on one side, leading into a casino.

There one can see some of the urban planning that has been taking shape in the authorities’ efforts to give Belize City a new image.

Landfill is enabling them to build a sweeping promenade, and some of the old buildings – battered by the hurricanes that come blowing in from time to time – have been beautifully restored.

Even if many of the local people are unemployed or poor, there is obviously a lot of money around as well.

Outside the Princess Hotel – the city’s finest – 4×4s and top-of-the-range limousines are lined up, while inside, the elite can enjoy the air-conditioned facilities.

Bizarrely, the huge hotel lobby has 500 slot machines on one side, leading into a casino. On the other, there is a cinema showing The Passion of the Christ… four times a day.

Talk about God and Mammon. I watch as a large American lady tourist pauses indecisively as she ponders these two alternatives, then heads off into the bar where they are selling pina coladas, two for the price of one.

On patrol

Back on the street, beaming smiles, tourist police on bicycles stop to wish one good-day.

Still a comparatively recent phenomenon, these police are largely credited with the marked fall in assaults on foreign visitors.

Their eagerness seems designed to extract the confession that one has not been mugged, or even felt remotely threatened.