Four Fish Read online

  These words stayed with me over the years to come. But histories of environmental wrongdoing have a strange way of putting traumatic events in the past, sealing off bad human behavior of former times from the unwritten pages of the present and the future. When such books become popular, there’s the impression that the various transgressions they expose have reached the public and that things must inevitably have changed for the better. Just as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had compelled the U.S. government to ban the pesticide DDT and help eagles, falcons, and hawks back to viability, I hoped that Cod, an international bestseller on an order of magnitude that no other fish book had achieved since Jaws, had brought the question of overfishing into public consciousness. Kurlansky’s book was published in 1998. By the winter of 2008, I wanted to believe that things had changed, that all the abuses that had been heaped on cod had been studied carefully by the scientific community and cleaned up by way of effective policy.

  Moreover, there were signs in other fisheries that the hopeless spiral of decline and extinction could be reversed. The American striped bass, which also had suffered a tremendous collapse in the late 1970s, had been protected by a three-year fishing moratorium in 1982 followed by an extreme reduction in commercial-fishing pressure thereafter. Today there are more striped bass around than at any time in the last hundred years. Surely, I reasoned, after fourteen years of commercial-fishing closure, conservation activism, and scientific research, it must be possible to go fishing for cod again on Georges Bank.

  Logistically, anyway, it was. Portions of Georges Bank have been opened periodically to fishing over the last two decades, and the party fishing boat Helen H out of Hyannis, Massachusetts, it turned out, was making daily trips to the bit of fishing ground around the banks that was open to recreational fishing. The December after I returned from my bass research in Greece, I received special dispensation from my family for a full twenty-four hours’ sea leave to give it a shot. Hitting the road from Manhattan late on a Friday evening, I drove through the night up I-95, the highway that had been my thoroughfare to many of the spots I’d fished along Long Island Sound in my youth.

  After New Haven the long urban reach of New York City started to fade and the highway stayed mostly dark, with the exception of a burst of light as I passed by my old college town of Providence, Rhode Island. Then on I-195, a little while after crossing into Massachusetts, the beautifully ominous Bourne Bridge loomed. The Bourne Bridge reunited Cape Cod to the mainland in 1933 after the Army Corps of Engineers had cut the Cape off with a canal in 1916. It was quieter than quiet now, the cold seeping into my car through the iced-over windows. On the other side of the bridge, with a light snow starting to fall, I drove a few more miles to the old whaling town of Hyannis and at 2:00 A.M. pulled into the Helen H’s parking lot. There, much to my dismay, was a huge crowd of unruly New Yorkers who had just made the exact same journey.

  They were bunched up in groups, according to nationality. Over to my left, with ice chests the size of coffins piled up on a kind of latter-day oxcart, were fifteen or so Koreans. To my right, a dozen Dominicans stamped their feet against the cold and rubbed their hands together in anticipation. Greeks, Croats, and other assorted seafaring ethnicities were also gathered up in smaller numbers.

  Still, even with the crowd and the long journey, I was glad to be in Hyannis that cold morning and glad to see a party boat with a full load in pursuit of cod. The American party fishing boat represents to me something special in the world—it is an outright acknowledgment of abundance. Unlike private charter boats, which can charge well over a thousand dollars for a day’s fishing, party boats are big two-hundred-foot bruisers that can hold sixty, even a hundred guys (and yes, they’re usually guys) and often make the trip for fifty bucks a man. The existence of a fleet of these kinds of ships that charge a reasonable sum to blue-collar folks implies that wild fisheries are still a common, reasonably plentiful, and useful resource.

  We all queued up against the shed to pay our fare. I recognized some of the people in line from the party boats I fish in summertime out of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Not wealthy people by any means: plumbers, carpenters, import-export stevedores. But then again, who was I to speak of wealth? Every single magazine and newspaper I wrote for teetered on the edge of extinction. The idea of deficits and cutbacks was on everybody’s mind. And the huge crowd at the fishing boat was not your average bunch of “recreational” fishermen. They were fishing for meat. Indeed, my own rationalization for making this trip had been in part economic. Since this was an offshore run, nearly three times as long as a Brooklyn day-boat trip, the fare was higher than usual—$170. The associated expenses of gas, tolls, and a gratuity for the mates would bring the total cost to something like $250. But the reports coming out of Hyannis had been good. Since cod populations had collapsed, the price of cod had risen quickly—the fish now fetched $13 per pound. I would need to bring back about twenty pounds of fillets—ten good-size fish—in order to break even. Any more and I would be beating the market.

  Fares were paid, and then the captain appeared and did the roll call, boarding passengers in order of reservation. The boat was sold out, and I had reserved the last available place over the telephone. I feared I would get a horrible spot near the bowsprit. But when I was called at last, I pushed my way through the crowd and spotted, miraculously, a widowed stern slot just off the corner, the place where, in my experience anyway, the greatest amount of fish are caught. My fishing place claimed, I found the last free bunk, and the Helen H began a slow grind seventy miles east toward the Nantucket Shoals, the slope leading to the underwater upwelling of Georges Bank.

  Just before dawn the engines slowed and the swish of rubber coveralls being slid over tired bodies woke me. I rushed out of my bunk to do the same. The Helen H circled, its sonar running, trying to locate a concentration of fish big enough to satisfy a full boat. When the engine finally cut out, the captain called us to the rails and the fishing began. Only a slow trickle of fish came aboard at first, and I remembered the voice of the Helen H secretary when I’d called to ask how the fishing was. “Excellent,” she’d said, almost too definitively. Was that the telltale hint of professional exaggeration in her voice?

  Fishing next to me, the Koreans, always good fishermen, had the first catches of the day, but they were unimpressive. One man on my left reeled in. “Small size,” he complained, holding up a codfish short of the twenty-two-inch federal size limit, then throwing it into his cooler anyway, despite the law. “Need a keeper size!” he said, as if to somehow excuse the fact that he had just killed an illegal fish by expressing that he wanted a keeper-size fish. To my right, another man fished with three hooks on his line (federal law allows only two), and one person over was another guy pushing the limits of legality by using an electric reel. Every time his lure hit bottom, he would immediately have a fish on. He’d hit the “retrieve” button on his reel, and with a loud zzz-zzz-zzz the reel would wind effortlessly up and he would throw an illegally short cod into his bucket.

  I, too, was catching small fish, but I treated them with excessive kindness when I brought them on board, keeping my fingers out of their gills, touching them as little as possible in order not to disturb the slimy mucus coating that envelops most fish and is their primary defense against topical infection. One fish I caught got snagged through its gut, and even though it would surely die, I returned it just the same, obediently following the rules. I caught a single keeper-size fish during the first hour and moodily stared at it in my cooler. “The two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fish,” my father would have said. What the hell had I made this trip for?

  At a certain point, though, the boat seemed to settle into its drifts and we somehow became more and more attuned to the size and movement of the body of fish below. The cod on our lines inched up in size, some of them well past the legal limit—a limit that had been imposed to ensure that as many codfish as possible got at least one successful spawning before being caught and k
illed. And soon the fishing became downright ridiculous. A dozen cod were now in my neighbor’s cooler and about half that many in mine.

  Now when I felt the tug of a small fish on my line, I left the jig down on the bottom to ensure that a second, larger codfish would hit the second, “teaser” hook. As the fishing got better and better, I became increasingly disrespectful to the short fish I had so pampered at the beginning of the day. Two small fish on my line meant the double task of removing hooks on unprofitable fish so that I could get back down to the bottom more quickly and catch more keepers. Instead of gently sliding hooks out of jaws, I ripped and pulled and put my fingers in gills to gain a better purchase.

  In the back of my mind, I remembered something Mark Kurlansky had mentioned in Cod. Something about how abundance with fish breeds, if not contempt, certainly a diminishing of respect.

  But that was just background noise. The abundance appeared all around the boat, in every incarnation. Black pilot whales crested in the smooth sea. Now and again, hundred-pound bluefin tuna, which I had been led to believe were nearing endangered status, cut the water with their crescent dorsal fins and exploded into the air in pursuit of prey. And the prey! Sand eels and herring by the millions dimpled the water and found themselves impaled on our jigs when a codfish did not occupy them. When one particularly large codfish came to the surface, I had to hurry to bring it in as an eight-foot porbeagle shark emerged and threatened to bite my catch in half.

  Soon the codfish became too numerous for my cooler, and I ordered up a second tote. When the captain blew the horn three times, signaling the end of fishing, I had nearly two dozen cod in all, my best day of cod fishing in many, many years. I had the mate fillet up all except two, which I left intact to show my two-year-old son, in the hopes that it would inspire him to become my fishing buddy in my later years. Lifting the cooler up and placing it into storage for the long ride back to port, I judged its weight in proportion to how my son feels in my arms. When he was born in 2006, he was twenty-two inches and six pounds, the exact size of a keeper codfish. At the time of my fishing trip he weighed thirty pounds, and my cooler felt twice that weight. I had surpassed my economic goal. I had spent a total of $246 but had managed to procure sixty pounds of codfish fillets, giving me a per-pound cost of just $4.10.

  A wild product more natural than organic and as cheap as chicken breasts. I climbed up into my sleeping bunk and tried to get some rest. And though the mutterings of the crew members could be heard below about how it had been a “so-so day” and “nothing like before,” the ache in my arms and the thought of my full cooler indicated a blissful, almost dizzying abundance.

  “Take that, Mark Kurlansky!” I said to myself as I drifted off to sleep.

  How many fish do we need for our food, and how many are there in the sea? Ultimately, all other questions about the future of the ocean fade in importance compared to these two essential inquiries. If we cannot figure out this basic equation, the continuation of marine life as we know it, or at least marine life as we want it to be, will be impossible.

  With respect to question number one—how many fish do we need?—it is possible to come up with a very rough estimate. Currently the world’s wild catch measures 170 billion pounds—the equivalent in weight to the entire human population of China, scooped up and sliced, sautéed, poached, baked, and deep-fried, year in and year out, every single year. This is a lot of fish—six times greater than the amount of fish we took from the ocean half a century ago. But if we were to follow the advice of nutritionists, the amount would be far greater. The British Department of Health, for example, suggests that a person should eat a minimum of two servings of fish per week—one serving of oily fish, like salmon, and one serving of whitefish, like cod. So if every single human being were to do what the British government says we should do, we would require 230 billion pounds a year—60 billion pounds of fish more than we harvest at the most exploitative period in history.

  This, then, puts a lot of pressure on the second question—how many fish are there? Finding the answer is much trickier. No one really quite knows how many fish there are and, more important for the future, how many fish there could be. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a kind of database of databases that compiles all the fisheries information from all the governments in the world, wrote in its most recent assessment of global fish stocks that “the overall state of exploitation of the world’s marine fishery resources has tended to remain relatively stable. . . . Over the past 10-15 years, the proportion of overexploited and depleted stocks has remained unchanged.”

  And yet this assessment of stability is up for question. The FAO fact-checks and audits its findings but admits that despite its efforts, its “fishery data are not fully reliable.” The FAO also notes a “spreading of over-intensive fishing from the northern to the southern hemisphere” and has provided “a consistent warning . . . about the consequences [of overfishing] for the overall sustainability of the global fishery system.”

  Nowhere is the stress on abundance more acute than with cod and the other whitefish that are used as “industrial fish”—the raw material for fast food and frozen supermarket meals. Whitefish today represent about a fifth of the world catch, or the whole human weight of the United States. They are principally animals of the order Gadiformes, cod being the most famous example of that order. But haddock, hake, pollock, and other gadiforms are increasingly folded into the mix. In Northern European countries, particularly the United Kingdom, cod and other whitefish represent the most-consumed fish in the national diet, making up nearly a third of all the seafood Brits eat, both as cheap fast food and as more expensive fresh fillets.

  The popularity of gadiforms is greatly aided by their morphology generally. Gadiforms live a lazy life, preferring to move slowly in chilly water. Their flesh therefore often contains a minimum of high-speed muscle tissue—tissue that is usually contained within the blood line that runs down the length of the fish’s fillet. Because the size of a fish’s bloodline contributes to its “fishy” flavor, cod do not taste very fishy. Cod also have a tendency to store oil in their liver rather than in their flesh. Since oil in the flesh determines the speed at which flesh putrifies when frozen or dried, cod and other gadiforms can be stored for great lengths of time. Gadiforms are therefore the perfect industrial fish: they are common, mild, and easily recast as different kinds of food products. Whether used as dried bacalao to feed slaves on southern plantations in the nineteenth century or as fish sticks to feed working families in the modern era, gadiforms should be—in a healthy marine ecosystem anyway—so plentiful that they shouldn’t seem special in the least. They are the true everyman’s fish.

  Gadiforms’ wide use as industrial fish also stems from the fact that they are available in waters of both hemispheres. Generally, animals that evolve in a cold-water ecosystem end up confined to a single half of the globe, because once they have adapted to cold conditions, warm equatorial climates are deadly and act as a kind of prison wall, effectively sealing off passage from one pole to another. It is for this reason that penguins are found only in the Southern Hemisphere and puffins only in the North.

  Gadiforms, though, are older than the hemispheres as we know them. The ur-gadiform is thought to be something found in fossil form in the North Sea, called Sphenocephalus. Modern gadiforms evolved from the extinct genus Sphenocephalus and radiated out to the Southern Hemisphere at a time when the continents were more unified and a bridge of frigid currents allowed cold-water fish to cross the equator. But approximately 45 million years ago, Australia broke away from Antarctica during the Eocene epoch, and a powerful whirl of water took shape that whipped around newly isolated Antarctica. This shunt, called the Circum-Antarctic Current, continues to spin at the bottom of the world today; it effectively walled off large populations of Southern gadiforms from their Northern cousins. These Southern gadiforms are only now coming under intense exploitation, but more about that later.


  Over the eons certain gadiforms, cod being the best example, developed an approach to life that grabbed every opportunity to become more numerous and then in turn used that abundance to perpetuate abundance over time. More sedentary fish that do not migrate broadly must content themselves with the biological energy available in their immediate environment. The sun can transmit only so much energy into a given square mile of sea, and that energy in turn can result in only a certain amount of plankton calories that are in turn passed up the food chain. But codfish travel far and wide and are highly omnivorous. Before human intervention the many ecosystems they traversed allowed them to build up extremely large populations.

  Whenever there is food energy available in a system, there is competition from multiple species for that energy. Cod bucked this competition by outright numerical dominance, managing over time to monopolize much of the energy pathways of the North Atlantic. The most analogous example to cod would be the Douglas fir, cedar, and redwood forests that came to dominate over other plants in the Pacific Northwest. Just as tens of millions of huge redwoods and Douglas fir trees spanned western North America from San Francisco to British Columbia and formed dense ceilings that blocked out all light and suppressed other tree species, so, too, did the vast schools of cod form a kind of predatory canopy over the continental shelves around North America and Europe. On Canada’s Grand Banks, codfish regularly reached five feet in length and weighed upward of a hundred pounds. Crabs, lobsters, mackerel, and other creatures that might have preyed on smaller, more vulnerable cod when they were first hatched were kept at low levels by the gape-mouthed, marauding hordes of big bad cod that monopolized the most productive swaths of current.