TIGHT LINES
with Andrew Spencer

EXTINCTION IS FOREVER

Yours truly got some bad news recently. It's all related to the fact that four percent of the world's population has naturally-occurring red hair. But if the Oxford Hair Foundation's predictions are correct, that fact will come to a screeching halt on an as-yet unspecified date sometime during the inaugural year of the twenty second century.

You see, it's predicted that by 2100, natural redheads will officially be extinct.

Given that yours truly has red hair - and it's all natural, baby - this news hit me kind of hard. It's a little tough to wake up one morning and be confronted by the fact that you're staring down the barrel of your own non-being. I mean, it's hard enough waking up every morning and being this irresistibly gorgeous - not to mention overwhelmingly modest, to boot - but couple that with your own eminent removal from the rolls of those in the realm of existence, and it's a pretty major pill to swallow. But before I flew off the handle in some kind of hell-forleather panic, I felt like I needed to know all the facts. So I dug a little deeper.

Science has never been my strong suit, but I forced myself to try to figure it out. From what I managed to gather from the language that I could actually understand, the gene that blesses a mere four-percent of us fortunate ones with red hair from birth is a recessive one. And what that means is that if this gene is paired with a gene for any other hair color, the other color wins out. Or something like that, anyway.

My math skills rank just behind my science skills in terms of ability, so when you start doing things like involving percents or Greek letters, my eyes glaze over and I start to drool. But as I understand the situation at hand, when you start with only four out of every hundred people on the planet having something that is beaten out by another thing, the odds aren't in favor of the original thing surviving long. And those odds get even worse when the population you're talking about has about six billion subjects. So, when you take four percent of that six billion … carry the five, divide by nine, multiply by the cotangent of the sine of the hypotenuse and add it to the circumference and get the T-score for the probability inside the sigma … um … sorry, Dad. Apparently math genes are also recessive. But at least I got the red hair, right?

This whole issue was, to say the least, horrifying, so I tried my best to distract myself into thinking of something else, anything not related to my impending demise. And as so often happens when I get to thinking, my thinking turned to thoughts of fishing.

And as long as I've still got all my own hair, I assure you that naturally-occurring segues will never cease to exist.

Friends and neighbors, back when I was in my youth - a time that seems like an eternity ago - striped bass were nearly nowhere to be seen. The Chesapeake Bay was polluted to the point that breeding grounds were getting choked out and over-fishing of the species led to scientists throwing around the e-word that is currently being applied to the future of us redheads. But, thankfully, regulations and a lot of selfimposed sensible fishing practices throughout the eighties and nineties have brought the stripers back to levels we were used to before the sharp population decline.

I'm not about to start sounding the alarm about striper populations just yet, but we do need to be thinking about things we can do now to make sure the environment we're in doesn't serve as a detriment to the fish that we're chasing after. A recent walk around Miacomet Pond and along the beach just south of the pond with the dog, though, showed me first-hand that we've got some work to do.

Beer cans, plastic bags, and an assortment of other garbage was scattered all around the road and the beaches. During the summer, it's all the rage to blame this scourge on the ambiguouslydefined "summer people," but unfortunately for us, there's no scapegoat around in February except for the local population. And I hate to sound like an old schoolmarm here, but folks, we've got to work a little harder to make sure we're doing our part to keep the beaches clean. If you bring it in, take it out with you. It'll take you an extra two minutes to pick up the garbage, but that two minutes of your time can help to keep all of our beaches clean. Think of it as a new car. When it starts out spotless, you work to keep it clean and free of blemishes. Let's apply the same logic to the beaches. Keep it clean so we can all enjoy it for a long time to come. We're not at the point where the Chesapeake was a couple of decades ago, but that's the kind of thinking that got the Chesapeake in the state it was in. So let's nip it in the bud and keep it clean.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the blood bank to make sure this genetic code remains in existence. I'm nothing if not a crusader for the cause of redheads everywhere.

Tight lines. I