Ichthyology Meets Ignominy at Awards Ceremony for the Ig Nobel Prizes

By DANIEL ENGBER

When Ben Wilson, a research associate at the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia, learned that he would be a co-recipient of this year's Ig Nobel Prize for Biology, he was thrilled. As the lead author of a study suggesting that herring communicate by flatulating, Mr. Wilson was clearly on the short list. But in a scientific coincidence that calls to mind Leibniz's and Newton's simultaneous work on calculus, researchers in