Four Fish (34 page)

33 Jac Gadwill’s socks:
Jac Gadwill left Kwik’pak not long after my June 2007 trip to Emmonak and no longer works for the company.

35 “Thou shalt not let thy cattle breed with unlike animals”:
Leviticus 19:19.

36 “selective breeding”:
My summary of animal breeding methodology is drawn primarily from Jay L. Lush,
Animal Breeding Plans
(Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1937), and also from Trygve Gjedrem’s
Selection and Breeding Programs in Aquaculture
(New York: Springer, 2005).

43 piles of bright orange salmon fillets:
For an amusing and thorough account of the dot-com-like salmon-farming boom that started in Norway and spread to Chile, Canada, and elsewhere, see Aslak Berge,
Salmon Fever: A History of Pan Fish
(Bergen, Norway: Octavian, 2005).

44 as salmon continue to be bred:
For discussions on feed-conversion ratios in farmed salmon and other aquaculture fish, see Rosamond L. Naylor, et al., “Feeding Aquaculture in an Era of Finite Resources,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,
vol. 106, no. 36 (Sept. 8, 2009), pp. 15,103-10, and Albert Tacon and Marc Metian, “Global Overview on the Use of Fish Meal and Fish Oil in Industrially Compounded Aquafeeds: Trends and Future Prospects,”
Aquaculture
, vol. 285, no. 1-4 (2008), pp. 146-58. Published feed-conversion ratios can be misleading, due to the fact that farmers and scientists often use different measures for determining the weight of feed. Farmers tend to use dry weight, i.e., the weight of dried feed pellets fed to salmon, while ecologists tend to look at wet weight, i.e., the actual weight of the raw fish that went into making feed in the first place. A kilogram of dry feed is a dehydrated distillation of wet fish and represents a much larger amount of actual fish.

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 Domesticated 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.