Four Fish Page 26

  44 displacing a self-sustaining wild fish population: Numerous authors debate the genetic and pollution impact of salmon farms on wild salmon. A summary of the arguments against salmon farming can be found in the anthology A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming, by Stephen Hume, et al. (Madeira Park, BC, Canada: Harbour Publishing, 2004). For every argument against salmon farming, there is a phalanx of aquaculture scientists ready to dispute critics’ claims. Both aquaculturists’ claims and environmental concerns are presented in detail in Katherine Bostick, Jason W. Clay, and Aaron A. McNevin, Aquaculture and the Environment: A WWF Handbook on Production Practices, Impacts, and Markets (Washington, DC: Center for Conservation Innovation, World Wildlife Fund, 2005). My impression from having looked at both sides of the debate is that diseases like infectious salmon anemia and parasites like sea lice represent the most palpable threat to salmon populations and that the genetic dilution of stocks is harder to prove. What is undeniable is that wild populations of Atlantic salmon are severely depressed and the severely diminished populations that remain are more vulnerable to disturbances in their environments than they would be if wild populations were abundant and robust.

  49 Diseases like infectious salmon anemia: Infectious salmon anemia, or ISA, first appeared in the early 1990s and has risen and fallen in increasingly larger waves ever since. In 2010 Chilean salmon production dropped by a third as a result of ISA. Eduardo Thomson, “Chile Salmon Output to Fall a Third, Association Says,” Bloomberg, Jan. 28, 2010.

  52 higher levels of PCBs: The Pew-funded farmed-salmon-and-PCB study is: Ronald A. Hites, Jeffery A. Foran, David O. Carpenter, M. Coreen Hamilton, Barbara A. Knuth, and Steven J. Schwager, “Global Assessment of Organic Contaminants in Farmed Salmon,” Science, vol. 303, no. 5655 (Jan. 9, 2004), pp. 226-29.

  55 PCB contamination in farmed salmon may offset: Mozaffarian’s meta-analysis of the risks and benefits of eating fish is: Dariush Mozaffarian and Eric B. Rimm, “Fish Intake, Contaminants, and Human Health: Evaluating the Risks and the Benefits,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 296, no. 15 (Oct. 15, 2006), pp. 1885-99. In addition, an excellent summary of the debates around pollutants in fish and relative health benefits can be found in Marion Nestle, What to Eat (San Francisco: North Point Press, 2007).

  67 a modeling exercise conducted in 1998 by a consulting firm: The study was conducted by ADI Ltd., 1998 and is described in A WWF Handbook on Production Practices, Impacts, and Markets as cited above.

  69 The world’s very first aquaculturists: A discussion of early aquaculture practices and how they could apply to a more environmentally benign approach can be found in: Barry Costa-Pierce, Ecological Aquaculture: The Evolution of the Blue Revolution (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002).

  76 The Donaldson is therefore a kind of genetic message in a bottle: My source for salmon reintroduction on the Salmon River in New York State is Fran Verdoliva, Salmon River special assistant, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Verdoliva wrote me in the fall of 2009 that for the first time since the 1800s forty-seven naturally reproduced Atlantic salmon were found in tributaries leading into Lake Ontario. This is a most encouraging sign, since Atlantic landlocked salmon are the truly endemic salmon to Lake Ontario.

  SEA BASS

  81 aquaculture is the fastest-growing food-production system: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s report The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008, ed. J.-F. Pulvenis de Séligny, A. Gumy, and R. Grainger (Rome: FAO, 2009), gives the most recent statistics on the growth of aquaculture worldwide.

  82 striped bass—perhaps the most famous game fish: An excellent account of the near demise and miraculous recovery of the American striped bass is Dick Russell, Striper Wars: An American Fish Story (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005).

  84 The English word “bass” derives from: Opinions differ on the derivation of bass. Anatoli Liberman had this to say, “I cannot say whether the origin of /barse/ was understood correctly by Friedrich Kluge, the author of a famous etymological dictionary of German, or James A. H. Murray, the great editor of the OED. Murray corresponded with German scholars on a regular basis. The first edition of Kluge and the first volume of the OED appeared almost simultaneously . . . but Kluge is a likelier candidate. Both refer barse/barsch to the root one has in English /bristle/, and both seem to have been right.

  84 Many moonfish are roundish and vaguely moonlike: Any reader looking to play the fish name game could spend a useful hour exploring the University of British Columbia’s Fish Base database, http://www.fishbase.org. Fish can be searched by common name or Latin name, and disambiguation information can further resolve conflicts on fish identity.

  85 Perciformes is the largest order of vertebrates on earth: My summary of the perciform dilemma comes primarily from a 2008 interview with Joseph Nelson, author of the frequently cited work on fish taxonomy Fishes of the World, 4th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006). One of the problems with sorting through the order Perciforme is that oceanic fish fossils typically fall to the bottom of the sea and then are reduced to magma when one continental plate is forced under another in the eons-long process of continental subduction. Contemporary taxonomists more and more are turning away from the fossil record and returning to fish classification armed with the tools of the relatively new discipline of phylogenetics. Phylogenetics compares living species’ DNA and looks for evidence of common ancestry stored within DNA. A discussion of phylogenetic approaches to decoding and properly classifying the so-called basses and perciforms in general is Wm. Leo Smith and Matthew T. Craig “Casting the Percomorph Net Widely: The Importance of Broad Taxonomic Sampling in the Search for the Placement of Serranid and Percid Fish,” Copeia 2007, No. 1.

  86 the fish we have come to recognize most widely as being edible: My description of the relationship of the swim bladder to fish morphology derives primarily from a 2007 interview conducted with David L. G. Noakes, professor and senior scientist, Oregon Hatchery Research Center and Oregon State University. The evolutionary developments for swim bladders in fish are much older than the perciforms—dating back perhaps 250 million years, as opposed to the appearance of the perciforms 85 million years ago. Coastal perciforms, like European sea bass, have more limited pressure extremes and thus are more likely to be in a depth range reachable by a primitive fisher. It’s of interest to note that benthic perciforms, like Chilean sea bass (cf. Patagonian toothfish), which live at depths exceeding two thousand feet, have smaller or even nonexistent swim bladders. Chilean sea bass/toothfish use oils secreted directly into tissues to meet their flotation needs. One reason that Chilean sea bass are so desirable as food fish is that their muscle tissues are infused with this flotation oil, making the fish extremely hard to overcook.

  87 the word labros, or “turbulence”: H. G. Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1945).

  87 “while with arts more exquisite the bass beguiles”: Several Roman poets writing on the European sea bass’s cleverness are quoted in Jonathan Couch in A History of the Fishes of the British Isles (London: George Bell and Sons, 1848). Ovid notes the fish’s tendency to burrow under a passing net, whereas Oppian suggests that the fish bends and twists and consciously makes a hole in its mouth to loose a hook. I don’t discount that fish have specific behaviors when pursued or hooked, but I maintain that a fish’s superior qualities are often anthropomorphic ascriptions and that the inability of fishermen to catch fish usually has more to do with a fish’s abundance than with its skill at evading capture.

  88 as you go up the food chain each level is thinner: My primary source for Mediterranean oligotrophia and interaction with human populations is a 2007 interview conducted with Constantinos C. Mylonas, Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, Iraklion, Greece.

  89 the meats they consumed consisted of: Diets of Neolithic humans and Galton’s principles for selection come from Juliet Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domes
ticated Mammals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  92 nutrition to last the first few weeks: Interviews with many aquaculture scientists contributed to my understanding of marine perciform domestication, including Constantinos Mylonas and Pascal Divanch at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in Iraklion, Greece; Josh Goldman at Australis Aquaculture, the cod farming research facilities at Fiskeriforskning and Akvaforsk in Norway; and Yonathan Zohar at the University of Baltimore.

  94 More than 70 percent of the fish Israelis ate were farmed: A history of the early days of Israeli aquaculture can be found in “National Aquaculture Sector Overview: Israel,” National Aquaculture Sector Overview Fact Sheets, text by J. Shapiro, FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department (online), Rome, updated July 6, 2006, http://www.fao.org/fishery/countrysector/naso_israel/en.

  96 marine aquaculture focusing on the Red Sea: In addition to being directly quoted, Yonathan Zohar is also my primary source for the early development of aquaculture in Israel.

  101 Explosives tossed from the boats: I have not encountered peer-reviewed documentation of Italians practicing dynamite fishing in the Ionian Sea, but Thanasis Frentzos maintains that the practice was a significant factor in the decline of wild sea bass in coastal Greece. Professor Konstantinos Stergiou, the director of the Laboratory of Ichthyology at the School of Biology of Aristotle University at Thessaloniki, confirmed the practice of dynamite fishing and the tendency of fishing methods to become more extreme the more reduced wild populations become.

  103 Mexican government would ban the United States from fishing for white sea bass: A thorough description of issues surrounding white sea bass can be found in: Melissa M. Stevens, White Sea Bass (Monterey, CA: Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch, 2003).

  103 the Patagonian toothfish, that sold poorly: Many authors (including the present one) have written about the Patagonian toothfish, aka Chilean sea bass. A book-length account of its discovery and naming is: G. Bruce Knecht, Hooked: Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2007).

  111 digest themselves after death: The use of rotifers and artemia as live feed is discussed at length in Manual on the Production and Use of Live Food for Aquaculture, FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 361, ed. Patrick Lavens and Patrick Sorgeloos, Laboratory of Aquaculture and Artemia Reference Center, University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium, 1996.

  112 Von Braunhut invented a whole parallel universe: Von Braunhut’s unusual life and his marketing of “Sea Monkeys” is summarized in “Harold von Braunhut, Seller of Sea Monkeys, Dies at 77,” New York Times, Dec. 21, 2003.

  113 “if we skimmed the oil off the top of the water”: Frentzos’s innovation of skimming oil off the surface of rearing pens appears to have occurred at similar times at other research facilities throughout Europe.

  118 “Fish of Greece”: To my knowledge there is no thorough peer-review analysis of the genetic profiles of sea bass and sea bream in the Mediterranean before or after the introduction of farming. But the fact that farmed bass and bream now predominate over wild bass and bream in the Mediterranean is to most scientists, including Yonathan Zohar at the University of Maryland and Pascal Divanch at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research at Iraklion, self-evident.

  119 the Rosetta stone of fish: There is a case to be made that the red porgy (Pagrus major) in Japan was the Rosetta stone fish of ocean farming. Many of the developments with red porgy paralleled those of European sea bass. In fact, the conditions that motivated the Japanese to tame ocean fish were quite similar to those of Israel—an isolated nation deeply concerned about national food security and faced with diminishing marine resources. Nevertheless, it was European sea bass that scaled up the fastest and introduced an aquacultured ocean fish to a global market the soonest. It should also be noted that once sea bass culture was launched in the Mediterranean, a parallel program to domesticate gilthead sea bream (Sparus aurata) in the Mediterranean also took place, and many farms in Europe now cultivate sea bream and sea bass at the same time. Just as sea bass made their premiere in the American market under the Italian name branzino, sea bream have arrived in European clothes, often called by their Latin name “aurata” on contemporary menus. When aquaculturists speak of the great breakthroughs in marine fish culture that took place in the Mediterranean, they often speak of European sea bass and gilthead sea bream in tandem. At a certain point developments and breakthroughs with sea bass and sea bream occurred neck and neck.

  COD

  129 “the last of wild food?”: My summaries of the history of codfish exploitation and the buildup of the codfish industry are drawn primarily from Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 1998) but also from a 2006 interview with George Rose, professor of fisheries at the Fisheries and Marine Institute of Memorial University Conservation at Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, and a 2008 interview with Heike Lotze, chair in Marine Renewable Resources, Biology Department, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  132 the price of cod had risen quickly: The price of all wild fish fluctuates in the course of a season and over the course of years. Cod most certainly can be found on the market for $8 a pound, but an informal survey taken of fishmarkets in the New York City area in 2007 put the average price at around $13 a pound.

  137 And yet this assessment of stability is up for question: The FAO lays out the issues of the reliability of its data mostly in reaction to a 2001 paper in the journal Nature by D. Pauly and R. Watson in “Fishery Statistics: Reliability and Policy Implications,” FAO, 2002, http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/FIELD/006/Y3354M/Y3354M00.HTM.

  137 particularly in the United Kingdom: British trends in seafood consumption comes from the Scientific Advisory Commission on Nutrition, “Advice on Fish Consumption, Benefits and Risks,” Food Standards Agency and the Department of Health (Norwich, UK: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 2004).

  138 Modern gadiforms evolved from the extinct genus Sphenocephalus: My summary of gadiform evolution and radiation is derived primarily from Jurgen Kriwet and Thomas Hecht, “A Review of Early Gadiform Evolution and Diversification: First Record of a Rattail Fish Skull (Gadiformes, Macrouridae) from the Eocene of Antarctica, with Otoliths Preserved in Situ,”Naturwissenschaften, vol. 95, no. 10 (Oct. 2008), pp. 899-907, http://www.springerlink.com/content/b3262512uh182823.

  142 menu items like McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich: For those curious about in fast-food lore, it’s interesting to note that the Filet-O-Fish sandwich was invented by Lou Groen, a McDonald’s franchise owner in the Cincinnati area who found he was losing his largely Catholic customers on Friday because he had no fish item on the menu. The first Filet-O-Fish was made using halibut, causing the sandwich to cost around 30 cents (late 1960s prices). McDonald’s executives demanded that Groen bring in the sandwich at 25 cents if they were to distribute it nationally. To bring in the sandwich at that price point, Groen turned to the much cheaper Atlantic cod. See Paul Clark, “No Fish Story: Sandwich Saved His McDonald’s,” repr. USA Today, Feb. 20, 2007.

  145 The United States had created a de facto marine reserve: Approximately 17,000 square kilometers of Georges Bank, or 25 percent of the area, has been closed to bottom trawling. In addition to spurring a recovery of cod and other gadiforms, University of Rhode Island researchers noted a fourteen-fold increase in sea scallops. More information on Georges Bank recovery data and a map of closed areas can be found in Georges Bank Benthic Habitat Study, http://www.seagrant.gso.uri.edu/research/georges_bank/.

  146 To this day neither . . . has ever done such a thing: This conclusion was made by Andy Rosenberg. Regulators in Europe and Canada would argue the semantics of this conclusion while acknowledging the inefficacy of regulation. Despina Pavlidou, director of the European Bureau for Conservation and Development within the Secretariat of the Intergroup on Climate Change and Biodiversity of the European Parliament, quite bluntly called the European Common Fisheries Policy “a failure.”

&
nbsp; 146 Georges Bank cod, the stock I was fishing: The stock assessments and rebuilding targets for Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine cod derive primarily from interviews conducted with Loretta O’Brien and Ralph Mayo and their published paper: Loretta O’Brien and Ralph Mayo, Status of Fishery Resources Off the Northeastern US: Atlantic Cod (Woods Hole, MA: National Marine Fisheries Service Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Dec. 2006).

  147 the time horizon for rebuilding has been extended: Rosenberg believes that the rebuilding target had to be extended for Georges Bank codfish because closure of fishing grounds did not occur fast enough back in the early 1990s. Had that last good spawning class of fish in the late 1980s not been fished so heavily, the biomass of the population might have been large enough to reach the earlier target date.

  147 the term “shifting baselines”: The original paper on the shifting-baselines theory is Daniel Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol. 10, no. 10 (Oct. 1995), p. 430.

  150 status quo of scarcity: Perhaps the most cited paper in the mainstream science press on the decline in fish abundance is Ransom Myers and Boris Worm, “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities,” Nature, vol. 423, May 15, 2003, pp. 280-83.

  152 “cod have complex population structures”: Ted Ames’s cod-population reconstructions can be found in: Edward P. Ames, “Atlantic Cod Stock Structure in the Gulf of Maine,” Fisheries, vol. 29, no. 1 ( Jan. 2004), pp. 10-28.

  152 “an awful lot of cod”: One anecdotal, personal observation on the recovery of cod: In the last two years, cod have appeared off Montauk, New York, in significant numbers for the first time in nearly two decades. In the winter of 2010, recreational fishing boats from western Long Island from as far west as New York City relocated to Montauk to get in on the fishery. Even boats in the Greater New York area reported catches of fifty to sixty codfish per boat in February of 2010. Biologists I interviewed were reluctant to say whether this newfound abundance in southerly waters represented a long-term trend.