Shaoyang News Online News (correspondent Xie Jianzhong) A group of small snails on a large tree on the seashore are eating leaves, and mudskippers climb to the top of the tree and eat all the "pests" in this group. This is a text in the second grade of the primary school Chinese edition of the "Fish on the Tree". The story of "mudskippers eat snails on trees" caused widespread controversy. Some people believe that "mudskippers eat snails on trees" violates the basic laws of nature and scientific knowledge, and is used as a text in the language textbook of compulsory primary education, which is bound to mislead people's children. However, some people believe that scientific fairy tales are different from mathematical, physical and chemical textbooks, and the appropriate use of exaggerated, anthropomorphic and modified techniques is more in line with the style of fairy tales, and there is no need to make a fuss. What do you think about that?
"The Fish in the Tree" is a 68-year-old scientific fairy tale created and published by Zhang Chong, a member of the China Science Writers Association and a member of the Jiangsu Writers Association, who created and published a scientific fairy tale 30 years ago, and was included in the primary school textbook of the Ejiao edition in 2003. Mr. Zhang Chong believes that scientific fairy tales are a scientific literary and artistic genre that disseminates scientific knowledge in the form of fairy tales, and its readers are children. Young children are in the stage of enlightenment, and the scientific knowledge involved in fairy tales should be novel, interesting, and easy to understand. Science fairy tales are not mathematical, physical, and chemical textbooks, let alone scientific papers, and the scientific content they contain must not be required with precision and meticulousness, because the science here is already an artistic science.
Professor Tang Wenqiao, a senior marine fish expert and doctoral supervisor of Shanghai Ocean University, believes that snails generally refer to gastropod mollusks living in humid land environments, but pseudo-manatees and shell slugs living on intertidal beaches are sometimes called sea snails. Sea snails can crawl, but generally cannot climb to the top of trees. There are many varieties of mudskippers, some of which are very good at climbing and jumping, and can also eat sea snails. The most climbing mudskippers may climb to the top of the tree at high tide, but even snails on top of the tree will be shaken off by the surging tide. Therefore, "mudskippers climbing up trees to eat snails" is just a scientific fairy tale and does not actually happen.
The fairy tale told by "The Fish in the Tree" was also complained about by Dr. Fu Xinhua, an associate professor at the College of Plant and Insects of Huazhong Agricultural University and a firefly expert. He tweeted that the content of the text written in this text, "Mudskipper fish eat snails on trees" "After consultation @ coaxing egg tarts, mudskippers do not eat snails, but eat some algae and other foods." Such a language textbook is a bit unreliable. After the microblog was issued, it triggered heated discussion among netizens. Some netizens think that the content of the text is made up by the author, and some netizens think that there are many kinds of mudskippers, there are meat and omnivorous, maybe some will eat snails? Fu Xinhua's son is in the second grade of primary school, and he wants to combine the content of Chinese teaching materials to do some nature education for primary school students, including his son, to expand their knowledge. After reading "The Fish On the Tree", he consulted a lot of information, consulted well-known experts in mangroves and fish in China, and learned that mudskippers do not eat snails at all, and he could not sit still. "Fairy tales cannot violate scientific knowledge, otherwise they will mislead children."
The @coaxing egg tart mentioned in Fu Xinhua's Weibo is Dr. Liu Yi, founder of the China Mangrove Conservation Alliance and an expert in mangrove mollusk research. Yesterday, Dr. Liu Yi said with certainty in a long-distance telephone interview with a reporter from the Wuhan Evening News that mudskippers will not eat snails, let alone climb to the top of the tree to eat snails. The description of "the fish that will go up to the tree to eat snails" described in "The Fish On the Tree" is purely fabricated. Liu Yi said that mudskippers grow in the intertidal zone and are often distributed in mangroves. There are three common types of mudskippers in China's mangrove areas: mudskipper, large mudskipper, and green mudskipper. Mudskippers are commonly known as jumping fish, which can jump or crawl on fins. They have gills and can live in both water and away from water for a short time. At high tide, mudskippers will climb to the trunk or branches not far from the surface of the water as the tide rises, but it is never possible to climb to the top of the tree. Mudskippers are omnivores, feeding mainly on benthic diatoms on the surface of the mudflats, and sometimes tiny animals, but not snails. Snails are afraid of salt and cannot live in the mangroves by the sea. There are snail-like gastropods in the mangroves, but they are all small conchs. Conchs only eat plankton on the surface of water bodies, do not eat leaves, and mudskippers do not eat conchs. However, when mudskippers move on the beach, they do drive away crabs that are close to them.
The author believes that "scientific fairy tales" must have objective facts as a scientific basis, and must conform to scientific principles, which is the product of the combination of scientific knowledge and fairy tale ideas. This is because scientific fairy tales, also known as knowledge fairy tales and nature fairy tales, are a branch of fairy tales (fairy tales in the broad sense), which have various characteristics of fairy tales. It and literary fairy tales (fairy tales in the narrow sense) are twin sisters. It is full of scientific enlightenment and has the beauty of art. It can cultivate the reader's interest in natural sciences and enlighten the wisdom of children and young people. Compared with general fairy tales, science fairy tales have a certain degree of knowledge, it is based on scientific knowledge as the content, and the themes expressed are also related to natural science. The difference between scientific fairy tales and general literary fairy tales is that it combines scientific connotations with fairy tale concepts, that is, the rational conceptualization of science as the perceptual image of fantasy, and the knowledge content involved in scientific fairy tales is generally relatively simple, and it does not have the task of popularizing science. "Fat Boy School", "Five Brothers Break Through", "Sardine Papua New Guinea", "Little Tadpole Finds Mother" are such fairy tales.
For example, the story of lightning and thunder. One day, the clouds were thick and the wind roared and the rain was pouring down, and electricity and thunder also set off in unison. Lightning quickly landed on the ground, and Thunder repeatedly came second, and it asked with a booming sound: "Electricity we all set out together, why are you always faster than me!" Am I too fat. "The next day, it was another dark cloudy weather, and the electricity went back and forth several times, but no thunder was heard. Lightning found Ray and was taken aback when he saw it, and found that Ray had become thin and unable to make a sound. Ray asked, "I obviously lost weight, why am I still not as fast as you!" This one...... I don't know, let's ask the human scientists! They found the scientist and explained the incident in detail, and the scientist said: "Because electricity is light, light goes 300,000 kilometers per second, thunder is sound, and sound goes 340 meters per second, so electricity is faster than thunder." Electric and Ray listened to the scientist's explanation and understood this truth. Ray said, "I know I'll never be able to run you, and I don't have to lose weight now." ”
This story illustrates: "Lightning and thunder are emitted at the same time, people always see lightning first, and then wait a while before they can hear thunder, because light (lightning) propagates much faster than sound (thunder)". It can be seen from this that "scientific fairy tales" must have objective facts as the basis, and what they convey to students must be scientific knowledge, and they must conform to scientific reasoning, and they must not fabricate and distort facts out of thin air, because science is honest learning, and the slightest phenomenon of "cheating" is not allowed. As Dr. Fu Xinhua said in an interview with the Wuhan Evening News reporter, language teaching materials cannot only be literature, not science. Dr. Liu Yi also believes that fairy tales can be appropriately exaggerated, anthropomorphic and embellished to conform to the style of fairy tales and be more vivid. However, if it violates the basic laws of nature and scientific knowledge, and is used as a text in the language textbook of compulsory primary school education, it will mislead people. Therefore, in order to be responsible for students, "science fairy tales" must conform to scientific principles.