Airline luggage wastes fuel and money

THE BUDGET airline taking me to France charged for bags checked into the aircraft hold. This did not, I hasten to say, affect me as I travel with only a spare pair of underpants, a packet of Daz and a few cyanide capsules in case the worst comes to the worst.

There was a certain sadistic satisfaction in watching the worst offenders among my fellow travellers cough up for their excesses; camels through the eye of a needle. People invariably carry too much luggage when they travel and vast quantities of fuel are wasted transporting superfluous junk around the world. No animal, except ourselves, carries luggage when it travels.

Charging for bags checked into the holds of aircraft is a welcome development from the environmental point of view. The polluter should pay for the damage he or she does. Of course, the budget airlines are not motivated by concern for the environment. They just want to reduce their baggage handling costs. But every kilo lifted into the air means that additional fuel is burned, adding to greenhouse gas emissions. The next stage for the airlines is to weigh the hand luggage and charge for that also.

Banning shopping malls from airports would be another useful measure. You don’t find railway stations choked with outlets for consumer goods, so why should airports be any different? Getting rid of the high-class hawkers at Dublin Airport would free up valuable space and, with a bit of architectural ingenuity, the building of a new terminal might be deferred. In any case, encouraging people to purchase more luggage when they are about to step on a plane is ridiculous. Of course airport operators will say that shops subsidise airports and keep down charges but this is a false argument; the passengers pay for any savings through their purchases.

Why don’t airlines weigh the passengers themselves and price air tickets by the kilo? The supersize-me brigade cost much more to transport than the lean and mean. Having to pay extra to fly would be an excellent motivator for weight watchers. Of course, the ultimate air travel economy measure is that passengers travel in the nude. This would eliminate the need for elaborate security precautions at airports; there would be no need for X-ray machines or sniffer dogs. Clothes and a modest quantity of luggage might be towed behind the plane in a glider, D-Day invasion style. Of course, travelling nude might engender lascivious desires among the passengers, a scandalous, or intriguing, possibility, depending on your point of view.

Oysters are supposed to encourage such tendencies. After my clothed, low weight, minimal cost flight to La Rochelle, I rewarded myself by consuming a few of these molluscs, washed down with that delectable fortified wine, Pineau des Charantes. Although I detected no particular stirring in my ageing loins, the oysters were delicious. But how did such cool slippery ocean-dwellers get a reputation for enflaming the passions?

Oysters themselves have a curious sex-life and to find out more about our aphrodisiac friends, I visited l’Huîtrièré de Ré, a sea-food farm which harvests 80 tonnes of them each year. All oysters, I discovered, are born male. They are sexually mature when a year old but, from about the age of three, they can change sex and reproduce as females. From then on, they switch sex back and forth as the mood takes them.

An offspring receives half of its genes from its mother and half from its father. From the point of view of the parent, this is hugely inefficient; half of his or her genes are not available to be inherited before reproduction even begins. Hermaphrodites, on the face of it, do better. Snails, for example, have both male and female organs. Each fertilises the partner and is fertilised in turn and so, from the point of view of a parent, there is no loss in gene transfer. Oysters, however, are fathers or mothers only in alternate years. This would not seem any better than remaining as one sex throughout life, so why do oysters opt for such a system?

Reproduction in oysters is a hit and miss affair. Their ancestors simply released eggs and sperm into the sea, relying on the vagaries of tide and current to bring the two together. Spewing eggs and sperm into the ocean is fraught with danger. Eggs are eaten by other sea creatures and there is no guarantee that an egg will encounter sperm. To increase the odds, females produce vast quantities of eggs; an oyster releases about a million of them, a most wasteful process. Shellfish have devised ingenious ways of minimising the problem. To increase the chances of hitting their targets, male oysters release a hormone which stimulates females to start taking in more water and with it sperm. Once fertilised, the eggs are retained by the female for about 10 days. Then, the little larvae are released and find a suitable rock on which to cling and grow. Eggs take far more resources to produce than sperm; being a female is much more demanding than being a male. Changing sex from year to year spreads the load and enables each individual to parent more offspring.