Once, walking into a hallway behind the scenes where some cichlids had just been moved from one tank to another, Scott had announced to me with concern, “I smell fish stress.” The scent is subtle—I cannot smell it at all—but the low-tide odor Scott detects, he explained at the time, is that of heat-shock proteins. These are intracellular proteins that were first discovered to be released, in both plants and animals, in response to heat, and are now known to be associated with other stresses as well. The scent makes Scott feel sick to his stomach—not because the smell is nauseating, but because
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