Four Fish (35 page)

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.”

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.

154 “lobster glut ”:
The recovery of lobsters in Maine is detailed in Melissa Clark, “Luxury on Sale: The Lobster Glut,”
New York Times
, Dec. 10, 2008, p. D3. Nevertheless some marine biologists have argued that the boom in lobsters (and snow crabs) owes itself not to good management of lobsters but rather to a dearth of predators like codfish that once preyed on juvenile lobsters. Ames disputes this point, arguing that accounts from colonial New England record massive amounts of cod
and
lobster being present in coastal fisheries.

157 fly the Nor wegian flag nearly as often as they do the Union Jack:
Observations on the Shetland Islands economy and social structure are based on interviews I conducted in and around Lerwick in the early spring of 2007.

158 laws that required cod be granted the “five freedoms”:
The five freedoms are detailed at
http://www.fawc.org.uk/freedoms.htm
.

159 This wild cod bacchanalia is an annual ritual:
The information about the interplay between wild
skrei
cod and farmed cod comes from interviews I conducted in the spring of 2006 with officials from the Norwegian Seafood Export Council, Tromso, Norway.
166 Things at No Catch started going downhill in 2008:
The implosion of No Catch’s farmed-cod attempt is detailed in Severin Carrell, “World’s First Organic Cod Farm Sinks into Administration with £40m Debt,”
Guardian,
Mar. 6, 2009.

169 But Unilever managed to pull off:
An account of the relationship of Unilever, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Marine Stewardship Council appears in: Bob Burton,
Inside Spin: The Dark Underbelly of the PR Industry
(Sydney: Allen & Unwin Academic, 2008).

176 The fish that were in Mr. Khon’s pond:
Most information about the Vietnamese
Pangasius
industry comes from a May 2008 research trip up the Mekong River. Particularly useful were the accounts of Flavio Corsin, an aquaculture scientist affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund’s Aquaculture Dialogues, who has been a resident in Vietnam throughout the explosion in
Pangasius
culture. Statistics on growth of
Pangasius
production can be found at
http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/globalmarkets/aquaculture/dialogues-pangasius.html
.

180 name for itself in the abundance arena:
Information on tilapia reproduction and growth is derived from e-mail interviews with Ron Phelps, assistant professor, Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures, University of Alabama at Auburn.

181 opportunity to turn the fish into a moneymaker:
Information about tilapia culture derives primarily from a session of the World Wildlife Fund’s Tilapia Aquaculture Dialogues I attended in December 2008.

181 off-flavor is one of the key reasons:
Information on off-flavor came to me primarily through interviews with members of the catfish industry in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama in the summer of 2008, with a detailed contribution coming from Craig Tucker, director, National Warmwater Aquaculture Center, Mississippi State University.

185 the considerably less regulated coast of Russia:
Alaska pollock’s drift into Russian waters was reported in Kenneth R. Weiss, “U.S. Fishing Fleet Pursues Pollock in Troubled Waters,”
Los Angeles Times,
Oct. 19, 2008.

 

TUNA

192 Tuna in the western Atlantic follow the river of higher-temperature water:
Background on tuna morphology, migratory patterns, and hunting behavior comes primarily from Carl Safina,
Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World ’s Coasts and Beneath the Seas
(New York: Henry Holt, 1998), and Richard Ellis,
Tuna: A Love Story
, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

194 an article called “The Holy Tuna Tablets” maintains:
“The Holy Tuna Tablets” can be accessed at
http://www.screamingreel.com/HolyTunaTablets
.

199 Their range encompasses nearly the entirety of the ocean:
Transoceanic migratory patterns of bluefin are still very much under research. In the Pacific, bluefin spawn on the western side of the ocean with a portion of juveniles migrating to the east. In the Atlantic, bluefin spawn in both the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean. Though the eastern Atlantic and western Atlantic bluefin are considered two different stocks, there is documented mixing of the population on both sides of the Atlantic and it is speculated that the mixing of the western and eastern stocks is an important factor in maintaining the overall health of the Atlantic bluefin population. For Pacific migratory patterns see Jeffrey J. Polovina, “Decadal variation in the trans-Pacific migration of northern bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) coherent with climate-induced change in prey abundance,”
Fisheries Oceanography
, vol. 5, no. 2 (Oct. 5, 2007). For Atlantic migratory patterns see Barbara A. Block et al., “Electronic Tagging and Population Structure of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna,”
Nature
, vol. 434128 (April 2005).

201 Catches from the high seas have doubled:
Data on high-seas catch trends were obtained from Wilf Swartz, a researcher at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre.

201 tuna sushi is a relatively new invention:
Trevor Corson, the author of the highly entertaining and informative
The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), provided information on the history of tuna and sushi in Japan, as well as some of the biochemical explanations as to why sushi is appealing to those who usually eschew cooked fish. In answering my questions about Japanese sushi habits, Corson drew on several sources from the Japanese translated by Corson and Sakiko Kajino. They are:
Nihonjin wa sushi no koto o nani mo shiranai
[The Japanese Know Nothing About Sushi], ed. Mitsuru Nakamura (Tokyo: Gakken, 2003); Morihiko Sakaguchi, Michiyo Murata, Satoshi Mochitzuki, and Yoshihiro Yokoyama,
Sakana hakase ga oshieru sakana no oishisa no
[Fish Experts Teach the Secrets of the Deliciousness of Fish] (Tokyo: Hamano Shuppan, 1999); Shinzo Satomi,
Sukiyabashi Jirō shun o nigiru
[Jirō of Sukiyabashi Makes Sushi with the Seasons] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1997); and Masuo Yoshino,
Sushi, Sushi, Sushi: Sushi no Jiten
[Sushi, Sushi, Sushi: The Encyclopedia of Sushi] (Tokyo: Asahiya Shuppan, 1990).

202 sportfishing of giant, thousand-pound Atlantic bluefin tuna:
A full account of the bluefin fishery in Canada and the Japanese businessmen who brought Canadian bluefin to Japan can be found in Sasha Issenberg,
The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the making of a Modern Delicacy
(New York: Gotham, 2007).