Four Fish Read online

  Why we originally chose to eat so heartily from the order Perciformes is connected to evolutionary advancements that date back 250 million years. Whereas more primitive fish must constantly swim to keep from sinking to the bottom, the forebears of the perciforms perfected an organ called the swim bladder, which they inflate with gas to keep them neutrally buoyant in the water column, much as a scuba diver inflates a buoyancy compensator to achieve a state of weightlessness. When a perciform dives deeper, it emits more gas into its bladder, which compensates for the added pressure of the water above. When it rises, it absorbs gas back into its tissues, once again finding a weightless equilibrium. And, like a scuba diver who has properly adjusted his buoyancy compensator, a fish that has achieved neutral buoyancy expends less energy.

  The perciforms’ victory over gravity has in turn led to other morphological adaptations that make them both successful animals and good to eat. Without a need to fight gravity all the time, perciforms became more efficient swimmers and were able to trade in their heavy, energy-demanding “red muscle” tissue for lighter, more delicate flesh. Hence the white, light meat of many perciforms. Perciforms also evolved an efficient muscle structure that is principally attached only to the central spinal column. The result: a smooth, mostly boneless fillet, very pleasant to eat.

  The last way the perciforms’ swim bladder makes them attractive to us as food is not the possibilities it gives them but rather the limitations it imposes. Going back to the scuba-diving analogy, there is only so deep a diver can go before his buoyancy compensator becomes useless. Below this depth, water pressure will overwhelm the gas inside the compensator and the device will implode, making the diver sink like a stone. Fish equipped with swim bladders have the same problem and are therefore limited to a certain depth range. Is it a coincidence that the maximum depth to which coastal perciforms can venture is similar to the depth to which a human free diver can swim or an early human’s primitive fishing line can reach? It could be that the fish we have come to recognize most widely as being edible are the ones that primitive Europeans could most easily catch.

  But to get back to why one perciform in particular, the European sea bass, ended up as my stepmother’s fish of choice, other issues need to be considered—most important, issues of fish scarcity and human abundance.

  As early humans perfected their ability to catch perciforms, they started to affect those fishes’ numbers. And the perciforms that disappeared early on became more prized. Evidence of this is the way humans began to endow scarcer fish with positive anthropomorphic characteristics, especially in places where the fish was subject to more intense fishing pressure. In the Anglo-Germanic part of their range, where human populations were sparse and fishing pressure modest, sea bass were called “bass”—that is, basically “prickly.” But in Mediterranean Europe the same species began to be named in a way that indicated agency and intelligence. The ancient Greeks associated the fish with the word labros, or “turbulence.” Homer uses labros in reference to wind and water, and later authors use it about people, in the sense of violence or boisterousness. But labros as it applied to sea bass gradually came to imply cleverness. In modern Greek the concept of the sea bass as a clever fish became its defining characteristic. Today the fish is called lavraki—“the clever one.” If you wanted to indicate in modern Greek that someone had cleverly figured out something tricky and challenging, you would say that he epyase lavraki—“he caught a sea bass.”

  The perception of the bass as clever occurs in other Mediterranean languages. The Romans named the fish after an animal they considered particularly intelligent—lupinus, which eventually became the French loup de mer—“sea wolf.” And the Latin poet Ovid wrote of sea bass as using its smarts to frustrate its potential captors. “In vain above the greedy [fisherman] toils,” Ovid wrote, “while with arts more exquisite the bass beguiles.”

  European sea bass thus seem to have rapidly solidified their reputation for cleverness in the Mediterranean. The reason for this may be a direct product of the holiday-like environment of the Mediterranean Sea, the place where humans and sea bass had their most intense interactions. The Mediterranean occupies an exceptionally warm and dry climatic zone. Most rivers on the European continent flow away from it, meaning that, compared to other seas, the Mediterranean’s biotic systems receive few nutrients. The sea is therefore described by scientists with the Greek-derived word oligotrophic—a place that “contains little nourishment.” This oligotrophia begins at the bottom of the food chain: only a sparse amount of phytoplankton is able to exist on the thin supply of wastes being washed in from land to sea. And with a very low food base at the bottom of the ecological chain, as you go up the chain each level is thinner than in most coastal areas. By the time one reaches the level of the European sea bass, both the population of fish and the size of individual fish are naturally smaller and more sensitive to overexploitation than in more productive seas. Recently the Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan told me that when she moved to the United States, she simply could not find the right fish for her European sea bass recipes. “Your bass are too big!” she lamented.

  The Mediterranean is also exceptionally deep—over three miles at its abyssal point near the Bay of Pylos. This makes it capable of retaining heat and keeping coasts warm even in times of extreme cold. During the last ice age, Mediterranean peoples not only survived but probably increased their numbers while the rest of Europe’s population dwindled in their caves.

  The presence of a consistently expanding human population combined with a sea that is inherently stingy as a food source created the conditions for an unbalanced man/fish relationship dynamic, a dynamic that would get continually more unbalanced as humans became more numerous and better at fishing. And it would finally reach a point where the man/fish imbalance was so great that something other than fishing had to come along to correct the disparity. The Mediterranean is many years ahead of the rest of the world’s oceans in terms of the rise of man and the fall of fish. The decline of wild fish stocks in the Mediterranean in the last half century and the subsequent attempt to repopulate the sea through aquaculture is a stark forewarning of what could happen all over the world as the oceans in general become oligotrophic—containing little nourishment for everybody.

  How did early humans choose the animals they were going to tame and eat? An examination of middens at Neolithic European dwellings reveals that humans used to eat from a fairly wide buffet of wild game. In varying amounts, the meats they consumed consisted of red deer, boar, cow, roe deer, horse, goat, antelope, elk, chamois, bison, reindeer, fox, badger, cat, marten, bear, wolf, dog, otter, lynx, weasel, mouse, rat, rabbit, beaver, and marmot. By the time of Christ, we were down to four basic kinds of mammals in our fire pits: sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle.

  When it came to birds, there was a similarly broad choice available. Pigeon, snipe, woodcock, pheasant, grouse, dozens of different ducks, grebe, various wading birds, and many more. Today we focus on four primary birds for our food: chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese.

  Why those animals?

  Irrespective of his infamous eugenics writings, anthropologists consider the list of criteria set out by the nineteenth-century intellectual Francis Galton as being a good thumbnail sketch for what guided Neolithic humans. Of the animals that humans chose to domesticate, Galton believed that they must have been: 1. hardy

  2. endowed with an inborn liking for man

  3. comfort-loving

  4. able to breed freely

  5. needful of only a minimal amount of tending

  When wild fish shortages in the Mediterranean began to be apparent in the 1960s, this list of criteria was readily available to anyone willing to do a little library research. Yet in the end the list was pretty much disregarded. The mid-1960s were the peak of the so-called Green Revolution, a time when great faith was put into often radical scientific techniques for boosting food production. This techno-enthusiasm held much greater sway over t
he early ocean-farming researchers than did the ancient choosing habits of Neolithic man. As an American ecologist and aquaculturist named Josh Goldman noted recently, “Fish farming has the misfortune of coming into being at a time when all sorts of science was at its disposal.” Through the application of modern research, scientists believed that any species could and should be tamed, regardless of how out of sync that species’ traits might have been with basic principles of domestication.

  Witness the European sea bass. If researchers had thought to measure the fish against Galton’s criteria, there is little doubt they would have chosen differently. It is a failure in every category:

  1. They should be hardy. European sea bass are not. Sea bass, like most ocean perciforms, lay over a million eggs, but out of this plentitude only one or two become viable adults. Not only are newly hatched fish extremely fragile, but there is a whole phalanx of diseases that attack them, particularly at larval stages of development. It is very difficult to make a long-term investment in a species’ welfare if the natural state of things is to have more than 99 percent of a population die.

  2. They should have an inborn liking for man. Sea bass and most marine perciforms are at best indifferent to us. While there are early examples preserved in the fossil record of Neolithic man’s having tied ropes around the jaws of bears and early horses and leading them around as pets, there is nothing quite analogous with marine fish. No early human ever went down to the sea and brought back a pet sea bass. There is, of course, a long tradition of freshwater aquariums and ornamental fish. But aquariums are simply moving landscapes—one-way interactions where little is expected of the domesticated animal other than color and motion.

  3. They should be comfort-loving. Sea bass and marine perciforms generally are not. They are responsive to easily available food, but many hate containment. Early attempts at taming desirable fish like the Mediterranean dentex produced dismal results—the dentex sulks listlessly at the bottom of a net pen and refuses to eat. Other perciforms, like the mahimahi, or dolphinfish, slam themselves repeatedly against their containment buoys or shred themselves to death against the netting of their pens.

  4. They should breed freely. Understanding mammalian reproductive systems was, even for primitive man, a straightforward thing to do. Coitus could be witnessed, as could the birthing of juveniles. But sea bass reproduction is mysterious, taking place largely outside the bodies of the fish with sperm and eggs that are nearly microscopic. Of course, fish reproduction is, as it is with all vertebrates, a matter of merging sperm and egg, but even with that understood, merely putting a male and female of the same species in a tank does not induce breeding. Most marine perciforms shut down their reproductive activity completely when brought into a captive environment.

  5. They should be easy to tend. Sea bass, when they are born, are distinctly unprepared for life. Domestic mammals and birds pass through their larval forms inside the nurturing body of a mother animal or within the hard, self-contained world of a nutrient-rich, calcium-based egg. In those cases humans do not have to meddle with the subtler, microscopic developments that transform a small cluster of cells into a complex, fully formed, and even self-reliant organism. Even most freshwater fish are better than sea bass; trout, salmon, catfish, and carp all hatch out of large, nourishing eggs, and after the young are born, the larvae emerge with a significant egg sac attached to their abdomens. Contained within that yolk sac is enough nutrition to last the first few weeks of free-moving life. Ocean perciforms, meanwhile, are completely defenseless. Since the game of marine fish is to play long odds, parents invest little into each individual egg. What scant nutrition exists is a bit like the few gulps of oxygen a passenger on a falling airplane might get in an emergency landing—enough to survive a transition but nothing to rely on beyond that. And so sea bass must find prey from the very early days of their existence. When the fish are in captivity, humans must recreate a whole parallel microscopic rangeland for these tiny hunters to make their first kills.

  In fact, if you were to look for a portrait of an animal that by all rights shouldn’t be domesticated, you would be hard-pressed to find a better example than the European sea bass for your case study. The logical decision would have been to seek out and tame a more naturally suitable animal. But Europeans already knew and liked the sea bass, perhaps more than any other European coastal fish. Even though it would take a substantial investment of money and intellectual energy to “close the life cycle” (as aquaculture scientists call the process of complete domestication), early aquaculture pioneers decided the sea bass was the best place to start.

  Like the airplane, the telephone, the incandescent lightbulb, and all other great technological leaps of modern history, the domestication of the sea bass specifically and ocean perciforms in general has a host of nations and individuals who claim to be the responsible party. Postwar Japan in the 1940s launched an effort to tame a famous but declining perciform—Pagrus major, or red porgy, another “holiday fish” that any self-respecting Japanese is all but required to have at a formal wedding banquet. In Europe, France worked intensively in the middle years of sea bass development in the 1970s, alongside serious study of a flounderlike fish called the turbot. But if necessity is the mother of invention, then an Israeli mother can lay a pretty heavy claim to birthing the domesticated sea bass.

  Long before other Mediterranean people felt that their wild fish had gone into enough of a deficit to consider replacing them with farmed sources, Israeli leaders were deeply aware of their nation’s shortages. “Food security” and “food sovereignty,” two terms that are today frequently discussed by agronomists and ecologists in the rest of the world, were the fundamental terms of survival decades earlier in Israel. Beginning in the 1950s, Israelis developed a multipronged approach for the development of homeland-produced food that involved a network of government research centers and kibbutz farm complexes.

  This applied approach to food development research was particularly successful with fish farming. The tight relationship between government institutions and working kibbutz farms meant that experimental projects could be instantly field-tested. This applied research had immediate payoffs. In the 1940s, collecting know-how from the postwar European diaspora, Israelis began cultivating carp, building on a four-thousand-year tradition that had been borrowed from China. Carp are not endemic to Europe. Their cultivation began with the opening of trade with China in the late Middle Ages, which had been launched in Europe to address a fisheries crash that had preceded the declines in the Mediterranean. Europeans had overfished their freshwater lakes and rivers since Roman times and had gradually turned some freshwater ponds into carp farms. But the European carp culture had always been something of a cottage industry; carp flesh had many small bones dispersed throughout and was often used by poorer folk in shtetls who ground it up into gefilte fish and other forms of processed fish meat. By 1948, in sharp contrast with the rest of the world, which continued to rely on wild fish, more than 70 percent of the fish that Israelis ate were farmed. Most of that farmed fish was carp.

  But carp live in fresh water—an extremely scarce commodity in Israel, often the very casus belli of regional conflict. What Israel did have was an abundance of salt water abutting its long seacoast. For a country with a total land area of only eight thousand square miles, an additional strip of potentially bountiful ocean territory had to be used.

  In 1967 another large resource fell into Israeli hands that would give them one more advantage in launching an ocean farming project. After a period of rising tensions that began, ironically, with a dispute over rights to fresh water in the Jordan River, war broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In what became known as the Six-Day War, Israel fought off an Arab offensive from all sides and in a counteroffensive wrested control of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. After the capture of the Sinai, religious Jews rejoiced that Israel now controlled the mountain where God supposedly gave Moses the Ten Commandments. Fish researcher
s (generally some of the more secular people you are likely to meet) had no interest in the mountain. They made for the sea and the rich waters of the Sinai’s coastal plain.

  On the northern edge of the Sinai lies Lake Bardawil, a sea within a sea formed by a spit of land that stretches semiporously across the top of the peninsula. This extremely hot, salty water is a holy land for European sea bass. Because it has little exchange with the greater Mediterranean and is located in a region of intense sunlight and rapid evaporation, Lake Bardawil is a zone of hypersalinity—a condition critical to spawning sea bass. It was on Lake Bardawil that a young endocrinologist named Yonathan Zohar was to begin research that would shape the fate of sea bass and, in fact, all fish for many years to come.

  If one were given over to poetic comparisons, Zohar might be likened to the Greek god Eros—the god of love and fertility. In reality Zohar is very concrete and empirical and uses a more scientific analogy to convey exactly what it is that he does. Recently he figured out a simile that works particularly well for his ninety-year-old mother. “I tell her,” Zohar explained, “that I am like ob-gyn for fish.” Over the years he has gained a reputation among aquaculturists as one of the world’s best at cracking the reproductive codes of the marine world.

  Soon after the Israeli annexation of the Sinai, Zohar began his graduate studies at the National Center for Mariculture of Hebrew University. Situated at the very extreme southern end of present-day Israel’s territory in the city of Eilat, the center was charged with developing marine aquaculture focusing on the Red Sea. It was the very Green Revolution sentiment of alleviating hunger that motivated Zohar in his choice of disciplines. “I wanted to do something,” Zohar told me, “that would help feed people.”