Four Fish Read online

  Suddenly I saw a human hand reach over in front of me and grab my diving vest. In the silent communication that happens underwater, I could read the grave concern in Neil Sims’s eyes. He looked at me wide-eyed and pointed down. I glanced below and saw the huge, gaping maw of the lifeless ocean beneath me. I had incorrectly set my buoyancy compensator, my human swim bladder, and if he hadn’t grabbed me, I was well on my way to sinking into the eight-hundred-foot trench below. Sims expertly inflated my vest. I began to float easily, and my breathing quieted.

  Sims waved me over to the side of the net pen. I floated above him silently, close enough to see that the fish actually seemed to recognize him. In what he would later describe to me as the “rockstar effect,” the fish crowded to be close to him, expecting from him some kind of deliverance or gift or both. Sims spread his arms out wide and seemed to take in their adulation.

  Kona Kampachi has over a 30 percent fat content, higher than most tuna. It retails for eighteen to twenty dollars a pound in fillet form and to date has a tenuous foot in the market. Production reached over a million pounds in 2008, about half the total world catch of bluefin tuna. It does not have the rich ruby color of tuna (a color that is often enhanced artificially by “gassing” tuna with carbon monoxide), but it is an extremely pleasant sushi experience—it satisfies the sashimi yen that has been created over the last twenty years—the yen for the firm, ATP-rich musculature of a fast-swimming pelagic fish.

  And for those who would still favor tuna, Neil Sims is quick to point out the essential imbalance between humans and those great fish. “Is tuna farming really going to be able to sate the panting palates all around the planet? We certainly cannot do it on the backs of wild bluefin or wild yellowfin any more than we could sustainably feed the world with wild woolly mammoths.”

  Kona Kampachi is slowly getting a reputation. It is, like Josh Goldman’s barramundi, like the tilapia and the tra, a good idea. But as the world tries to emerge from financial crisis money for ventures like Kona Blue may dry up. Can we embrace a whole new set of species that we don’t know intimately? Can true sustainability rise above the noise of so many pretenders to that name? Can we come to an understanding of which fish work for us and which fish don’t? I would hope so. I would hope that these traits, these characteristics, become the traits and characteristics we desire most. Our survival and the survival of the wild ocean may depend on it. I took one more look at Neil Sims floating below me with arms outstretched, his kahala finning in the current each one mutely appraising this conductor of an all too silent concert. The only sound was the whir of bubbles boiling by my ears up toward the silver mirror of the surface above.

  I got one last chance to go out tuna fishing before I concluded my research for this book, but this time I was to come on as an observer and not a fisherman—a role I bridled against at first but one that, as the enormity of the problems facing bluefin hit me, seemed more apt. My hosting vessel was a sleek sportfishing boat that travels up and down the East Coast hunting tuna during their annual migration. In summer months the boat pursues the smaller yellowfin and bigeye tuna as a charter operation, but in January she and her crew take up residence in Morehead City, North Carolina, a key stop on the giant bluefin’s passage down the coast to its spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico. As we set out from port at three-thirty in the morning, I could discern at least a dozen other wakes of the most state-of-the-art fishing vessels, also out for bluefin, piercing the darkness as we sped toward the grounds.

  The January bluefin fishery seems a lot like sportfishing, but it is in fact commercial. Once upon a time, bluefin were numerous enough to allow harpooners and netters of different sizes to pursue the fish. But now, with the fish’s numbers in severe decline, only hook-and-line fishermen are allowed to attempt to catch them. As the boat’s engines stepped down to trolling speed, the mate let out eight different lines rigged with spear-nosed ballyhoo baitfish into the wake behind us. The commercial limit for bluefin was set at two fish per boat, but based on what I had heard, the fleet of a dozen-odd boats would be lucky if they brought in two fish altogether. Still, for the happy hunter who does get one the price is worth it. A single wild bluefin will often sell for more than ten thousand dollars.

  Our crew was slightly different from the others out fishing bluefin that day, in that we had with us a cameraman and a professional sports angler from a popular cable-television show called Quest for the One. So popular had Quest for the One become that the producers were branching out with a sequel, a show called Monster Fish. The professional angler, a man in late middle age, was supposed to fight a monster bluefin in what could be a multihour battle.

  It was a particularly rough weather day, and the crew was being constantly thrown about as they readied for the fishing. Like picadors and banderilleros in a bullfight, the captain and mate rushed around, prepared baits, guided lines up the outriggers, and generally did all they could to secure the possibility of a strike. The professional angler lay like a matador on the couch in the boat’s luxurious stateroom, awaiting the moment when he would be summoned to take on his much larger challenger.

  Two fishless hours passed for the entire fleet. Feeling a little queasy, I wandered out to the cockpit to get some air while the mate rigged ballyhoo fish in a manner that he didn’t want me to describe or the camera man to film. So scarce were the bluefin in the winter of 2009 and so numerous were the boats that even the small advantage of a uniquely hooked baitfish could mean the difference between a ten-thousand-dollar day and a zero-dollar day. As the mate rigged baits, our conversation fell to the situation across the Atlantic, where bluefin were being either relentlessly hunted for direct sale as wild fish or scooped up as juveniles and sold to tuna ranches.

  “It’s a sad situation,” the mate said, popping out the ballyhoo’s eyes and running a wire around its bill. “They’re just killing them over there in Europe. I mean, we’d shut our fishery down in a second if they’d stop.” I thought of Neil Sims’s Polynesian, the bare-chested pursuer of trochus snails who cried when he was told that the trochus season would be closed. “But there are still some left!” the old man had said. Was there really so much difference between that old man in the dugout canoe and this college-educated American in the sleek fiberglass hull of a sonar-equipped, half-million-dollar sportfishing cruiser? The owner of the boat later made the very accurate assertion that the purse seiners catching juvenile bluefin in the Mediterranean are catching a hundred times more fish than his boat trolling off Morehead City. His boat was allowed to catch only ten bluefin a year, and the boat stayed very much within its legal limit. But still, those ten bluefin are some of the last huge breeders that play a critical role in the survival of the stock. The Morehead City boat was following the rules. Many fishermen in the Mediterranean are not. But everyone is still fishing. No one is stopping. These thoughts filled my head as I returned to the cabin and nodded off to sleep.

  After two more hours of dragging baits in the penumbra, the mate poked his head in the door.

  “We got something up ahead,” he said excitedly. The professional angler rose with what seemed to me to be a slight whiff of boredom. Another long fight with another big fish. I, on the other hand, who had never seen a giant bluefin, bounded up the ladder that led to the console where the captain scanned the horizon eagerly.

  “Look at that shit up ahead,” the captain said. “It’s fucking raining birds.”

  I’m slightly nearsighted, and at first I couldn’t make out what he was pointing to, but as the boat moved forward, I saw seabirds gathered up into a cloud, the size and violence of which I had never seen before. Gannets—big, albatross-like pelagic birds—flew hundreds of feet above the churning surface of the water. In a flock of many thousands, they whirled in unison and then, as if on command from some brigadier general of bird life, dropped in an arc, bird after bird, into the water beneath. The gyre of gannets turned in a clockwise direction, and down below, spinning counterclockwise, was the lar
gest school of dolphins I’d ever seen. There in the angry blue-green sea, the dolphins had corralled a vast school of menhaden—small herringlike creatures that, when bitten, release globules of oil that float to the surface. Oil slicks flattened the water everywhere as the dolphins swirled around, using their exceptional intelligence and wolf-pack cooperation to befuddle and surround the fish, which in turn whirled in a clockwise direction.

  It was one of those rare moments where one has a vision of the scope of the wild ocean. Not just small cylinders firing to keep a tiny engine running, but rather the giant, massive gears of nature, each one with its own reasoning, its own meta-logic, spinning in its particular circle in competition or in confluence with the gear below it. We zeroed in on the school, but our progress was painfully slow. It would have been foolish to speed into the midst of the tumult—we would have ruined our baits in the process and doomed our chances of hooking a tuna.

  But, luckily, the commotion did not subside. If anything it only grew more frantic and exuberant on our approach. Beneath the birds, beneath the dolphins, beneath the menhaden, there should have been an equally vast school of giant bluefin tuna, collaborating with vertebrates of the so-called higher orders of life to form the floor of the prey trap, sealing the baitfish in from below, while the dolphins and birds made up the trap’s walls and ceiling. A strike from a giant tuna seemed inevitable. The professional angler cracked his knuckles below in the cockpit. The mate scanned the outriggers.

  But as we passed through the orgy, it appeared that this trap had no floor. Only dolphins, an animal humanity has decided are “good” and worthy of preservation, breached endlessly in the white water around us. Only gannets, another animal that has similarly been deemed “wildlife” and is no longer shot and killed, swirled above us and plunged like a global squadron of dive bombers into the sea below. The vast machinery of the food web spun out before me and would continue to spin, conceivably for millennia to come, with our tacit approval. But the final gear in the system, the tuna, the part that interested me most, was missing.

  Those who study fish or pursue fish or live among fishermen love fish dearly. Meanwhile, the rest of the world eats more and more of them every year without ever really bothering to learn what any of those fish look like, how they behave, or how many remain. I hold on to the hope that the dynamic might change. That fish might one day be understood as their own kind of perfection, meriting their own special kind of respect. Recently I asked a biologist who had spent his life studying tuna whether he thought that bluefin could ever be elevated to the status of a whale or a dolphin and given protection akin to that afforded the other great animals on earth.

  “What I always say,” he told me, “is that in the early days of the founding of the United States, right there in the Constitution it said that a black man was once worth three-fifths of a white man. And look at us now. Never say never.”

  Conclusion

  Whenever I told people that I was writing a book about the future of fish, I would typically get two reactions. The first was the urbane, witty response. “Oh?” my interlocutor would say. “I didn’t know fish had a future.” Though it was flip and shortsighted, I didn’t mind this reply. People generally don’t like to look an ugly and serious problem in the eye, and the redirection implicit in this comment was, in a way, very honest and very human.

  It was the second response that I found more troubling.

  “Oh, you’re writing a book about fish. Which fish should I eat?”

  Perhaps it is a particularly American trait—the belief that the individual by his or her personal actions can somehow shift the course of history. But when it comes to choosing the “right” fish, the sentiment I first noticed in the United States has spread to other nations, to the point where a veritable chorus rises up from any table I visit, be it in England, France, South America, or Asia, every time I mention my damn fish book.

  “Which fish should I eat?”

  Choosing a fish that is well managed or grown on a farm that uses sound husbandry practices is most definitely personally satisfying. One feels “good” when one eats “well.” It is not for nothing that the Buddha himself included sound eating practices as part of the path to enlightenment. “Do no harm,” the Buddha spoke, “practice restraint according to the fundamental precepts, be moderate in eating. . . .”

  But the public’s choosing of “good” fish in the marketplace has had little effect on the actual management of wild fish or the practices of growing farmed ones. The Monterey Bay Aquarium—which has distributed over a million seafood cards that label fish as “red” (avoid), “yellow” (good alternative), and “green” (best choice)—took the brave act of commissioning a survey of the programs’ effects. The results were telling: fishing pressure had not been significantly reduced on any of the species or stocks consumers were advised to avoid.

  In defense of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I don’t believe that the program’s innovators thought seafood-advisory cards would actually change fish-consumption patterns. First and foremost, the ratings cards were conceived of as tools for public education. Prior to their introduction, relatively few people knew about the overfishing of bluefin tuna, the negative effects of farming Atlantic salmon, or even the existence of good fishing practices and bad ones. People generally saw individual species the way Mark Kurlansky’s mother saw cod: “fish.” A crop, harvested from the sea that magically grew itself back every year. A crop that never required planting.

  The historical vocabulary around fish echoes this sentiment. Think of the word “seafood” itself. How many genera and species are described by these two opaque syllables? Equivalents in other cultures are no less vague or misleading. In German, French, Spanish, and most of the other Western European languages, seafood is “sea fruit.” Slavs, meanwhile, often call the many creatures of the oceans “gifts of the sea.” All these expressions imply that the ocean’s denizens are vegetative, arbitrary, and free of charge. So-called vegetarians, indignant over the suffering of farmed cows and chickens, frequently include wild fish in their diets. Kosher laws that mandate the merciful slaughter of mammals and birds do not apply to fish.

  Thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and other organizations, we are now at a point where we know something about fish. We know that overfishing can and does happen. That, as with terrestrial animal husbandry, fish farming has problems of waste management, disease, and industrial pollutants. We are not Neolithic cave dwellers, showering this flock of passenger pigeons with arrows or driving that herd of mastadons over a cliff. We have inklings of what it is we are doing.

  Nevertheless, we are still not grappling with the quandaries of fishing and fish farming in a manner commensurate with the contemporary battles of the food-reform and land-based environmental movements. We are now a bit like the jury in the 1818 Maurice v. Judd case. Whereas that jury sequestered itself to decide whether or not whales were fish, we are now deliberating over whether fish are wildlife—wildlife that is sensitive to our actions and merit our sound protection and propagation.

  It is not that we don’t have choices to make. But the choices ahead are large societal ones that require our careful attention and our active political engagement. After forty years, beginning with the near global collapse of wild salmon, to the revival of the American striped bass, up through the closure of the cod fisheries on the Georges Bank and Grand Banks, and on into the rise of more sustainable-aquaculture alternatives like tilapia, we have seen numerous examples of oceanic disasters interspersed here and there with real improvements. Wild fish globally are declining, but the examples of science-based successes are marked, accurately documented, and clearly replicable. Pollution and dead zones have grown, but, unlike the terrestrial environment, the essential habitat of much of the world’s marine life remains reclaimable. On dry land, urban sprawl consumes 2.2 million rural acres a year in the United States alone, but there is no equivalent development of the sea. If left alone, marine ecosystems have a tendenc
y to rebuild themselves. Global warming is changing oceanic conditions, but fish have survived extreme climate change before and can again. Although ocean acidification is a real and growing threat, a rebuilt and robust wild fish population could help buffer ocean pH. Fish excretions, it turns out, are on the basic side of the pH spectrum. A radical increase in wild fish could be a bulwark against acidification.

  What is needed now is a societal choice to give priority to a set of clearly achievable goals for wild fish. Those priorities should include:

  1. A profound reduction in fishing effort. The world fishing fleet is estimated by the United Nations to be twice as large as the oceans can support. This overcapacity is being maintained primarily through government subsidies. Many billions of dollars are paid by governments to support fishing fleets that without subsidies would not turn a profit. Subsidies thus make wild fish unreasonably cheap. A move away from large, heavily extractive (and heavily subsidized) vessels that employ very few individuals is critical. An emerging “artisanal” sector of respectful fishermen-herders that will steward the species, as well as catch them, needs to be encouraged and higher market prices will be able to support that kind of activity.

  2. The conversion of significant portions of ocean ecosystems to no-catch areas. Up until the last decade, the default assumption with the ocean has been that any ocean habitat could and should become fishing grounds if fish are present in abundant numbers. There is, however, growing evidence suggesting that key fish breeding grounds and nursery habitat must be reserved as safe havens if overexploited fish populations are to rebuild to harvestable numbers. It is still a matter of controversy how much territory should be put aside for fish reserves, and today an average of only 1 percent of the world’s ocean habitats is protected from exploitation. Surely developed nations that already protect around 10 percent of their land areas could see fit to come up with a similar amount for their ocean holdings. Rather than eating into our principal as we’ve done for the last thousand years, by setting up a network of fisheries reserves we will in a sense put a portion of our ocean wealth into low-interest municipal bonds, an investment that if left alone will pay a steady, compounded interest over time.