In a sophisticated polyculture environment, salmon would bypass the smaller fish that eat seaweed and would eat feed pellets synthesized from seaweed directly. By feeding in this way, we would in effect be reducing the trophic level of farmed salmon, turning them from predators into something closer to filter feeders. This would result in fish markedly lower in PCBs than those animals fed with unpredictable wild-fish feed sources. And the beauty of the system is compounded by the fact that the waste those salmon generated would in turn feed mussels and also grow more seaweed. Fish meal and oil would still be needed as very early feed for juveniles and to maintain the health of broodstock fish, but these would be minimal compared to what is needed at present in a traditional salmon monoculture.
Some purists argue that this is a bastardization of a salmon. That a salmon is naturally a predator and should naturally eat fish. An oft-quoted trope of the anti-salmon-farming camp is that we shouldn’t be farming the tigers of the sea.” But as Rick Barrows at USDA pointed out, this is a question of perspective. “We can farm the tigers of the sea,” he told me, “as long as we feed them hay.”
The unavoidable truth is that way back in the Middle Ages, when the first attempts were made at domesticating salmon, we should have chosen something else. There were most definitely better, more efficient fish out there. But we simply didn’t have the technology to tame those other fish. Salmon’s large eggs, their responsiveness to human intervention, and a lot of applied breeding science has advanced the human/salmon relationship to a level of complexity not seen with other marine animals. Quite simply, we know the salmon better than most other fish on earth. We have mapped large portions of its genome, crossed its families, and studied its life cycle intimately. To start anew with a completely different animal at this point would mean many decades of backtracking.
And so we’ve reached a crossroads with salmon. Either we can invest money and effort into making a more and more artificial salmon, one whose very genetic components are profoundly different from their ancestors, or we can simply say that we’ve gone far enough with selective breeding. That the selection that should happen now is the means of feed and husbandry practices that sustain these farmed fish. Instead of putting artificial selection pressure on salmon, it may be time to put selection pressure on farmers. Let the fittest, most closed system survive and reap the economic benefits inherent within that victory.
A side from many stories and much pertinent information, I have retained one very useful possession of Jac Gadwill’s—those exceedingly warm socks. It was those same thick wool L.L. Beans he’d loaned me, which I’d forgotten to give back, that I slipped onto my feet a few months after my return from Alaska. I then donned a pair of chest waders and stepped into the swift current of New York State’s Salmon River. After so many months of researching salmon, watching other people catch salmon, and comparing how different types of farmed salmon stress the environment, I’d had enough. I wanted to get back to the reasons I became interested in fish in the first place. I wanted to catch a salmon.
Thirty years ago this would have been impossible in the Salmon River. Just as they were eliminated from Connecticut, salmon were eliminated from New York back in the 1800s. Many attempts to reintroduce them to Lake Ontario failed miserably. A lot of this was due to a profound shift in the environment. Industrial and agricultural runoff had fouled the water. The native freshwater herring runs that salmon had dined on had been displaced by alewives, a small seagoing fish that had invaded the Great Lakes with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway. With no predators to speak of, the alewive populations would soar and then die off in huge numbers when algal blooms caused a seasonal deoxygenation of the water. In the summertime along the shores of Lake Ontario the stench was horrific. A trip to the beach was a dreaded prospect for children all along the lake’s coastline.
It is a different Lake Ontario and a different Salmon River now. With my pole in my left hand and my right grasping a tree branch for support, I pulled myself up out of the current and onto a rock, then paid out enough line for a cast. The fall foliage was in full swing, and the river was crowded with other fishermen in identical gear, methodically flipping their flies upstream and following them with their eyes as they completed their drifts. Periodically a flush of water released by the dam south of us sent a surge of discarded Styrofoam coffee cups swirling downstream. A rusty shopping cart overturned in the eddy next to me tottered in the current, with several old fishing flies and a length of monofilament line ensnared in its metal grillwork.
It seemed at first like one of those days that fishermen rue—when men far outnumber fish. All the activity, the flailing of line, the sloshing of boots, the tying and retying of different lures—all of it ritualistic hooey, designed more to impress other anglers than to draw the strike of a fish.
But as my eyes adjusted to the autumn light and the shapes beneath the surface of the water came clear, a vision presented itself that was, for me, heart-wrenching. The piece of algae that fluttered in the current next to the rock I stood upon recast itself as animal and not vegetable. It was in fact the frayed pectoral fin of a king salmon, a thirty-pounder, lazing in the current, not unlike that king salmon I’d seen twenty years earlier, just as the Oregon wild salmon were dying out for good. And at once the truth of the river came clear to me—I could see that next to this salmon was another, possibly its mate, and next to her was another and another. The river was paved with them. A hundred fish within reach of a cast.
Alongside all the extreme laboratory-based selection that has occurred with salmon, there is a kind of hybrid of natural-unnatural selection at work here in the Salmon River. The salmon at my feet in the lee of the current were Donaldson-strain kings, bred in a facility near Seattle, Washington, from a wide range of many different strains. Several of those strains are now extinct in their native Pacific Northwest environments. The Donaldson is therefore a kind of genetic message in a bottle, an amalgamation of genes, lost and found, combined in such a way as to make the Salmon River habitable by salmon again.
Around the world, while salmon geneticists try to make salmon more and more efficient and fit for a tank, there is starting to emerge a kind of reverse engineering in which wild-salmon advocates are applying more science-based methods to make tank-reared salmon fitter for return to the wild. In rivers where salmon had gone nearly extinct, like the river Tyne on the northeast coast of England, salmon rehabilitators are starting to find that the genetic complexity we have lost and fetishized over the last half century may not necessarily be the only key for staging a wild salmon resurrection.
Less than fifty years ago the Tyne was in the most dismal state of all United Kingdom salmon rivers. Its proximity to the industrial town of Newcastle, combined with a dam thrown across the river to create the Kielder Water reservoir, had destroyed the salmon population entirely. Not a single salmon returned to the Tyne in 1959. It might have stayed in this condition had it not been for a biologist and sportfisherman named Peter Gray, who decided to go against the popular conclusions in the arguments about salmon and genetics.
“If we go back to just after the last ice age,” Gray wrote me, “all our salmon rivers had to recolonize. The genetic integrity had to start all over again.” Salmon rivers were wiped out by glaciers throughout their range between ten thousand to twenty thousand years ago. Somehow, from a small genetic redoubt, they were able to reclaim their kingdom. There is a metagenetic component that must be respected, Gray agrees. West-coast Scottish salmon “turn right” to go north to Greenland, whereas east-coast “turn left.” Putting a west-coaster in an east-coast river could send fish on a deadly holiday to France.
But if you have these metacomponents correct, you can start to goose salmon back to viability. Gray believes that we must get away from the mammoth hatcheries and industrial hatching facilities the salmon-farming industry helped concoct. Genetics are important, he agrees, but he has found that properly preparing juveniles for reintroduction and timin
g the stocking of rivers is even more so; it means the difference between success and failure. Hatchery-born salmon, it turns out, have to be taught what it’s like to be wild again in order to make it. Gray introduces strong riverlike currents in their larval tanks. He feeds them insects and other food they will encounter in the wild when reintroduced to the river. And he releases them at a time when he knows other predators in the river will be largely absent or not feeding. All this has meant a complete reversal in the fate of the Tyne. Within thirty years of starting his efforts, he has brought the Tyne to the point where more than twenty thousand adult salmon return to spawn every year.
Salmon are inherently fragile, but also perhaps inherently resilient. Most salmon rivers were ruined at a time when we did not know how to mitigate our impact. But now we do. And if we can clean up rivers and make salmon-friendly conditions more possible in their former range, perhaps we will see wild salmon again in our lifetimes. In New York’s Salmon River where I stood, I saw the evidence of this possibility with my own eyes. The Donaldson salmon that were stocked in the 1980s were originally put into Lake Ontario and the Salmon River for neither food nor sport, but rather to try to deal with the stinking mass of alewives that washed up on local beaches every summer.
The Donaldson fish did just that. But they grew big and powerful and beautiful, and fishermen wanted to catch them and eat them. The only problem was that Lake Ontario had suffered from nearly a century of industrial pollution, pollutants that ranged from persistant heavy metals like chromium to the manufacturing elements of the Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange. The fish were dangerously toxic. Fish and Game was ordered to stop stocking Donaldson kings into the Salmon River because of the health risk they posed to fishermen should they eat their catch. But even after Fish and Game stopped stocking them, something unusual happened. The Donaldson kings started spawning naturally. They had gone native.
The purist in me, the fisherman, the seeker of truly wild fish, wanted to recoil. What were these salmon at my feet? What would they become? What were Pacific salmon doing in a habitat that should be ruled by Atlantic-strain fish? What good were they to anybody if you couldn’t eat them? All this went through my head until suddenly one of them, a magnificent golden brown animal four feet long and nearly a foot across the shoulders, reared up out of the water and grabbed my lure, pulling me off my rock with the force of its run. It was the pull of something wild. Something that dragged me upstream from my depressing thoughts of vanishing fish, suggesting that all was not over with salmon in my life. A mental adjustment would have to be made, but it seemed wrong to deny the presence of this salmon, an undeniably powerful and beautiful fish, in a river that twenty years earlier had been entirely devoid of them.
“To hell with it,” I said to myself as line screamed off my reel and my heart beat and I chased the big fish up the river. The Salmon River, after all, should have salmon in it.
Sea Bass
The Holiday Fish Goes to Work
When you ask most seafood eaters which fish are farmed, most will say “salmon.” Beyond that, consumer knowledge gets fuzzy. People seem to have a vague awareness that fish farming is growing, but why, where, by how much, and through what means remain under the radar. Consumers’ default assumption still seems to be that a fish on the plate is most likely going to be wild. This in spite of the fact that aquaculture is the fastest-growing food-production system in the word and will likely surpass wild production within a year or two (if it hasn’t done so already).
Take my stepmother, for example. About five years ago she told me she had found a new favorite fish. She’d eaten it on a recent trip to Italy, and she was happy to discover on her return that the fish had just become available in many upscale Italian restaurants throughout New York City. Lunching with her one day, I finally got a look at this new animal. It was called “branzino” on the menu, and, in the style of European seaside restaurants, it was to be served grilled and whole. Before it hit the flames, the waiter brought the fish out so that we could assess its freshness and quality and perhaps also to give us the impression of a holiday meal at the shore. My stepmother did not enjoy this part—her diet is, with the exception of fish, vegetarian, and she does not like to be confronted with evidence that fish are animals, with eyes as intelligent-looking as any mammal’s.
The branzino was very fresh—its gaze was clear and its scales clamped down tightly against its flanks. It was exactly the size of a dinner plate, silver in color, with an attractive streamlined profile that reminded me of the American striped bass—perhaps the most famous game fish in America and a fish that has grown scarce on American menus since commercial fishing for it was temporarily banned in the mid-1980s and then severely restricted thereafter. A look through one of my fish atlases at home later that day revealed that the branzino was indeed very close to a striped bass—some taxonomists had even moved it over into the same genus as the striper—Morone.
The British call branzino “bass” or “sea bass” or “European sea bass,” and they pursue them in their wild form as ardently as I had hunted striped bass in my youth. And once I’d made the acquaintance of European sea bass / sea bass / branzino, I found that I came across it everywhere. In the dozens of faux-French bistros that had sprouted up in America’s urban centers, it was called “bar” or “loup de mer.” In Italian trattorias that claimed a southern or Sicilian provenance, it went by the name “spigola,” while the Spanish served it up with yellow rice as “robalo.” And always when it appeared, it was brought out whole and fresh, eyes clear and intelligent, exactly the size of a dinner plate. A European seaside holiday in the time span of a single meal.
Where had this fish come from? “Europe!” I was told by a variety of waiters. Where in Europe? No one quite seemed to know. “Maybe the Mediterranean?” Why were we eating this European bass instead of a local fish? “Because it’s European!” seemed to be the most common answer.
During the next few years, I was to become more intimate with the European sea bass. I was to find that the taming of the European sea bass was one of the most important developments in the relationship between humans and fish. For the forces that brought the plate-size European sea bass to restaurants around the globe represented the next phase in both managing and domesticating the oceans. Unlike salmon, which adapt relatively easily to a farmed environment, sea bass and the wide range of ocean fish that we eat are difficult to master. Their early lives are microscopic, their breeding habits complex, and they seem inherently resistant to our designs of putting them into our underwater mangers. That sea bass were pulled out of the vast background of wild fish and eventually tamed turns out to be the end result of a two-thousand-year-old process of exploitation and scientific investigation, one that involved the efforts of ancient Roman fishermen, modern Italian poachers, French and Dutch nutritionists, a Greek marine biologist-turned-entrepreneur, and an Israeli endocrinologist. All of them advertently and inadvertently created the conditions for an endgame that resulted in the globalization of the European sea bass.
I was also to learn that by charting the history of European sea bass and the word “bass” in general, I could get a sense of what had happened to the world’s coastal fisheries in the last quarter century and how human beings have gone about laying the groundwork for the next great artificial selection.
What do fishmongers and restaurateurs mean when they encourage us to choose something called bass? And why do so many fish seem to be lumped under that single name? The answer brings us back to the persistence of the primitive relationship between fish and fishermen and to the superstitious, highly unscientific way humans distinguish “good” edible fish from bad ones.
The English word “bass” derives from the Germanic barse or barsch, meaning “bristle” and most likely refers to the five-odd spiny rays that jut out from the dorsal side of species bearing that name. But as Anatoly Liberman, author of the book Word Origins and How We Know Them and one of the world’s leading expert
s on names and their derivations, told me, fish names are slippery and not necessarily married to any one characteristic. “Several different fishes may have identical names, whereas similar-looking fishes may have widely different names.” The name “moonfish,” for example, applies to fish in at least seven different genera around the world. Many moonfish are roundish and vaguely moonlike, but many are not. As Liberman explained, this may stem from the fact that the very nature of hunting wild things compelled humans to be tricky and evasive with the names they chose. “Hunters and fishermen are superstitious people,” Liberman continued, “and often prefer to call their potential prey in some indirect way, so that it won’t hear and recognize the word.”
Nevertheless, as humans emerged from prehistory into an age of reason and classification, a somewhat primitive reliance on outward physical appearance rather than evolutionary provenance has up until the twentieth century guided taxonomists. In the modern era, everything commonly called bass, be it a European sea bass, an American striped bass, or a Chilean sea bass, is classified as belonging to a single scientific order, the order Perciformes, whose root, perc, drives the researcher back to the Greek perkē. When that is combined with the Latin formes, we end up with a classification that means, broadly, “perch-shaped.” Many fish turn out to be “perchshaped”—Perciformes is the largest order of vertebrates on earth, containing over seven thousand species and most of the so-called game fish of the world. It is so large a classification that taxonomists often call it a “garbage-bag holder,” used to contain a ridiculously large number of vaguely similar species that people haven’t quite gotten around to properly classifying. Curiously, and perhaps not altogether coincidentally, the order Perciformes includes most of the fish in the sea that people of European descent consider edible. “If it’s perchlike,” the classification seems to be saying, “let’s eat it.”
Four Fish Page 8
