FISH, perhaps not unexpectedly, are not good forecasters of weather. It is said they tend to swim closer to the surface just before it rains, a habit which some experts attribute unconvincingly to related falls in atmospheric pressure and resulting changes in the oxygen content of the water. Some fishermen, will tell you that with approaching rain the fish are more inclined to take the bait than they are in settled weather, and that, once hooked, they fight more strenuously others will tell you the very opposite. And there is general agreement that when a thunderstorm is nigh, fish become less active and refuse to bite.
But the most skilful fishy forecaster, allegedly, is not a fish at all. The dolphin is a mammal, slightly larger than a porpoise, with a characteristic, slender, rather pointed snout or beak and stories about its intelligence and friendliness towards man abound, and its meteorological expertise has long been recognised. The latter is particularly well known in Kerry, where the Dingle Bay, dolphins have been closely watched in recent years as harbingers of good weather.
Strangely enough, history belies the Kerry dolphins. Despite their friendly demeanour, the animals are more associated in traditional weather lore with storms and high winds, than with calm, sunny, pleasant conditions. According to the ancient wisdom, when the dolphins are more active than usual "it foreshows a wind, and from that part from whence they fetch their frisks"; the herd flees the wind, it seems, and approach from the direction from which a storm can be expected. Even worse conditions are in store when they run into bays and harbours, and gambol on the surface, or as the Roman poet Lucan had it, when
... in various turns the doubt ful dolphins play,
And thwart, and run across, and mix their way.
For these reasons, dolphins frolicking around a ship were regarded as unlucky omens by sailors in the days gone by. As Dante puts it in his Inferno:
Like dolphins, when a signal they transmit.
To mariners by arching of the back,
Prognosticating angry tem pests, dark and black,
Require that they, to save their ship, take counsel fit.
Some analysts believe that this boisterous behaviour of the dolphins is brought on by an electrically charged atmosphere they say precedes a storm. But then a Julius Caesar remarked in De Bello Gallico shortly after his unforgettable revelation that all of Gaul was divided into three parts, Homines is quod volunt credunt: "Men readily believe that which they wish to believe".