Four Fish

by Paul Greenberg

  But why did the Israelis start with sea bass? The answer appears to be its potential not only as a food source but also as a commodity. A French fisheries policy analyst told me recently, “Traditionally, sea bass was rare. It was a big fish that you had for a special party with friends and family.” This was a tradition that dated back to ancient times. Romans believed that the fish should be cooked whole, un-gutted, and the head was particularly prized.

  Romans probably made their case for sea bass throughout the continent, for European sea bass have an exceptionally broad range—inhabiting the entirety of the Mediterranean on out to the Strait of Gibraltar and up the coast of Spain, France, England, the Netherlands, and the Baltic coast of Germany. In a way it is a kind of fish version of the euro, a valuable silvery commodity that finds its way into near-shore pockets of virtually every continental country’s coast. It had in effect marketed itself to Europeans for centuries. Israelis realized that developing a marine fish as a viable domesticated product would take a huge investment. At least some prospect of selling the fish at a profit had to be on the horizon. With such a large international reputation and the added value of being considered a holiday fish for which people would pay high prices, the sea bass seemed, in spite of its biological limitations, the best one to try.

  But in order to make this holiday fish into an everyday fish, several difficult constraints had to be mastered. Since no one had figured out how to make sea bass spawn in captivity, Zohar and his colleagues had to collect fish from nature for their research. This is where Israel’s acquisition of Lake Bardawil became of critical importance. Early on, Jewish researchers passing through the newly captured Arab land realized that Lake Bardawil was a gold mine for research.

  “It was very difficult,” Zohar recalled. “You used to go to the Bardawil, travel for days and collect the young fish, and you’d truck them back across the desert all the way to your tanks in Eilat and start to grow them, which, if you think about it, is a pretty crazy way to do aquaculture.” Many uncomfortable days in those trucks for Zohar, a tall, lanky man with a chronically bad back, eventually sparked some serious rethinking. Collecting fish from hostile Arab territory and then growing them in Israel was ridiculous.

  For a while Zohar and his colleagues tried replicating the environment of Lake Bardawil. But nothing worked. And so they looked at the problem from the biochemical side. “We developed a hypothesis,” Zohar recalled, “that the lack of the correct spawning conditions is transduced into a hormonal failure, . . . and so we decided we had to go into that hormonal system and try to see what was going on.”

  Getting to the hormonal center of a sea bass and the other perciforms being investigated at Eilat was not an easy thing. Sexual hormones are manufactured in a fish’s pituitary gland, an organ about a quarter of the size of a pea, located inside the bony casement of the fish’s skull. Over the course of the next ten years, Zohar led a team that picked through tens of thousands of fish heads, tweezing out the tiny pituitaries and sending samples around the world for analysis.

  There is a natural human tendency to want to create linear narratives out of the disorder of day-to-day life. But science is far from linear. The understanding of perciform reproductive systems took a decade of false starts. At one point, after a particularly arduous harvesting of ten thousand pituitary glands, a laboratory where Zohar had sent the samples for analysis called to tell him that all the pituitary material was “degraded.” Years later Zohar still raises his bushy white eyebrows recalling the frustration. “I tell her, ‘No, no, no, no, no. It can’t be! I collected it as fresh as it can be!’” Zohar spent another twelve months harvesting another ten thousand pituitaries, only to get the same answer from the lab.

  Zohar’s career itself might have “degraded” into an endless spiral of worthless research at that point, had he not decided to revisit the results. When he did, he realized he had unlocked not just the secret of sea bass reproduction but a basic problem that underlay all questions of fertility, even human. Zohar realized that the spike noted in the lab’s analysis showed a profound chemical shift. The sample wasn’t degraded; an additional hormone—a new one that no one ever before knew existed—was present in the fish’s pituitary during spawning, which had thrown off the results.

  The problem seemed solved. But again, perciforms are tricky. Within a few hours of injecting the fish with the spawning-inducing hormone, the chemical would completely disappear from the fish’s bloodstream. It seemed that a “cleaving enzyme” was the problem; there appeared to be a compound manufactured inside the wild fish, always at the ready to dispel the effects of the hormone. Eventually Zohar realized he would have to manufacture a whole new hormone that was impervious to the enzyme.

  Making the hormone took even more analysis and years of false starts. But when it was achieved, not even this was enough. Sea bass are “asynchronous spawners,” fish that hold on to their eggs for many days so that they may spread them out over a variety of terrains and conditions. It was therefore necessary to hormonally convince sea bass that now is the time, this is the place—lay all your eggs at this very moment, because this is the best bet you’re ever going to get in your entire life. Eventually Zohar’s lab engineered a microscopic polymer-based sphere that would slowly release the hormone into the sea bass’s bloodstream, causing the fish to expel all its eggs and sperm in a single, predictable period.

  By the 1980s, sea bass fertility had finally been decoded. But by the time all this had been achieved, times and world events had shifted and the window that would have allowed Israel to corner the sea bass market began to close. The Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt in 1979, and with it Lake Bardawil and all the potential research it represented. While scientists like Zohar had been launched in their careers and their scientific discoveries by a bold, food-desperate Israel, that nation had lost its impetus by the 1980s. The survivalist kibbutzim of the early idealistic days were fading. Scientists like Zohar left for positions abroad.

  The task of launching the sea bass on its global odyssey, an odyssey that would lead to my stepmother’s plate in New York, would have to fall to another country. As luck would have it, it fell in 1982 to the nation where odysseys were invented.

  If Yonathan Zohar is the Eros of sea bass, then it’s fair to consider a tall Greek man named Thanasis Frentzos as the fish’s Odysseus.

  Thanasis lives on the island of Cephalonia, located midway up the western coast of Greece. Within sight of Odysseus’s home island of Ithaca, Cephalonia is emerald and olive in its highlands, with wide, foaming rivers that empty into the bluer-than-blue Ionian Sea. In recent years archaeologists have put forth the idea that Cephalonia may in fact have been the real home of Odysseus, that the small island next door is an impostor island—a lesser remnant from a volcanic explosion that broke the original, much larger proto-Cephalonia into a half dozen pieces. When flying over the island it is easy to imagine the place as being the “sea-girt land” of Odysseus’s kingdom, one Homer aptly described as “a rugged territory, and yet a kindly nurse.”

  Thanasis is similarly Homeric. Trim and square-shouldered, with a deep, resonant voice, a flowing mane of hair, a heroically long and flat nose, and an impressive, curling beard, he seems like someone recently escaped from the side of an ancient urn, sprung into life with all of Odysseus’s wily enthusiasm. But where Odysseus set sail on an eastward course from his home island toward Anatolian Troy to reclaim a beautiful woman, Thanasis in 1982 headed west, to Sicily, to bring back twenty thousand European sea bass.

  Just as Helen was snatched away from Greek shores by foreigners backed by the power of the gods, the few remaining pockets of wild sea bass in western Greece were, according to Frentzos, stolen throughout the 1960s and ’70s from Greek waters by foreigners backed by the power of dynamite. As the home sea of twenty-three different nations, the Mediterranean has since 1949 been regulated by the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM), one of the oldest regional fishi
ng agreements in the world. The GFCM historically manages large migrating stocks of fish, like hake, that cross multiple borders. Member nations have been relatively compliant in jointly managing these “straddling stocks” of fish, and managers report that these populations of fish are in decent shape. But sea bass are considered “local” fish and are not overseen by the GFCM. As a result it falls to individual nations to protect stocks of sea bass. In the 1970s, while Thanasis was getting his doctorate in marine biology in New Zealand this oversight had major repercussions for Greek sea bass. For just as in ancient times, Greeks proved largely ineffective in defending their property from the wiles of Romans.

  There is a general rule when it comes to overfishing. If no regulations are put in place, the more fish populations decline, and the more extreme and ecologically damaging fishing methods get. Extreme methods are considered necessary to make a day’s fishing worthwhile. Beginning in the 1970s, poachers speedboating over from Italy armed with dynamite sealed the fate of the bass in the Ionian Sea. Explosives tossed from the boats and detonated underwater would create violent pressure waves that overloaded the sea bass’s neurotransmitters, knocking them unconscious and causing them to float out of the crannies of their home reefs. Unconscious, the bass were unable to regulate their swim bladders, and so their bellies would swell with gas and the fish would rise to the surface, where they were scooped up and taken back to Ancona and other towns along the Italian coast.

  When Thanasis returned from his studies in New Zealand, he saw a very changed sea. Even during the prime sea bass spawning season, the so-called halcyon days of the January thaw, when the kingfisher birds would return to the Ionian Sea to lay their eggs (“halcyon” coming from the Greek word for kingfisher), he noticed very few spawning sea bass. When a sea bass did appear in the marketplace, it was an event. A whole two-pound fish could cost the equivalent of fifty U.S. dollars.

  So Thanasis Frentzos decided to head to Sicily to find his own sea bass. For in the interim between when he left for New Zealand and when he returned, French scientists had picked up where the Israelis had left off and advanced sea bass domestication considerably. Italians were now employing some of the French technology in makeshift hatcheries, and Thanasis figured that Italy was the easiest and cheapest location from which to get the fish to Greece. Once he got them home, he planned to raise these fish to adulthood and begin a self-perpetuating colony of domestic sea bass on Greek territory. Perhaps he saw this as a way of restoring a piece of Greece’s heritage, much the same as Greek nationalists at the time were pressing England to return the Elgin Marbles that Lord Elgin took from the façade of the Parthenon.

  But Thanasis’s goal was not only patriotic. The idea of a fisheries crisis was starting to move from being a uniquely Mediterranean phenomenon to being a global one. Anyone studying marine biology at that time could sense a change in the air. In 1977, in response to many nations’ complaints that their fish were being “stolen,” the United Nations passed a revised Law of the Sea Treaty that allowed countries to expand their sovereignty from three miles up to two hundred miles out to sea—the zone that most fish called “bass” were likely to inhabit. The United States aggressively developed its own treaty, called the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which effectively shut European nations out of New England’s Georges Bank and other fertile fishing grounds up and down the Atlantic coast of the United States.

  Conservationists were also starting to gain ground. In 1982, the same year that the International Whaling Commission passed a global moratorium on the hunting of whales, the eastern United States’ favorite bass, the American striped bass, reached its lowest population levels on record, resulting in a similar moratorium several years later. American striped bass, a fish that early English settlers probably named after the European sea bass, had declined precipitously throughout the 1970s to their lowest levels in history. Thanks to a protracted effort led by sportsmen and conservationists, all fishing, sport or commercial, was banned for three years. Also in 1982, another popular fish called bass, the California white sea bass, was facing similar regulatory reductions. In that year the Mexican government would ban the United States from fishing for white sea bass in Mexican waters, thereby removing yet another bass from marketers’ rosters.

  In response, in 1983, still another “bass” was to appear in markets in Asia and America—a fish called the Patagonian toothfish, that sold poorly until it was renamed “Chilean sea bass.” An international niche for a white, meaty, basslike fish was starting to open up around the world. And for Thanasis Frentzos it seemed that the chance to “catch a sea bass” in the literal and financial sense of the Greek expression was close at hand.

  Greece in 1982 was not an easy place to finance a risky venture. A military junta known as “The Colonels” had been ousted less than a decade earlier, and the country was still seen as something of a European banana republic. But Cephalonia is known as an island of eccentrics and risk takers. Its patron saint is St. Gerasimos—the protector of holy fools. Thanasis was lucky enough to have a friend in Marinos Yeroulanos, a civil engineer-turned-entrepreneur and fellow Cephalonian. Yeroulanos loaned Thanasis the equivalent of two yearly salaries for a marine biologist, as well as his yacht, and, in the tradition of earlier Cephalonians, Thanasis set out on a thirty-foot sailboat with a tiny engine across a dangerous sea.

  On arriving in Sicily, Frentzos stopped at the holding station where he was to pick up his fish. He was deeply unimpressed. The owners had gotten their hands on a load of three-inch sea bass from an Italian research institute and had reared them in a lagoon to the size where they could be sold. Loading up Frentzos’s tanks, the Italians raised their eyebrows at his jerry-rigged boat but gladly accepted the payment—twenty-eight thousand dollars—a fortune in Europe at a time when banks were charging an average of 20 percent interest for business loans.

  Sailing out of the harbor, Frentzos began to feel more hopeful. He calculated how much the load might be worth if he were to manage to get the sea bass home and grow them to their full market weight. After growing his twenty thousand little sea bass to market weight, about two pounds each, multiplied by fifty dollars per fish. . . . Could it really be a million dollars? Of course there would be expenses. And inevitably there would be some mortality.

  But most fish mortality happens during the very first days of a fish’s existence, a phase that Thanasis, a student of ichthyoplankton, knew well—the microscopic yet monstrous-looking forms fish take when they are first hatched. During his time in New Zealand, Thanasis had spent countless hours looking at these strange pre-fish fish through a microscope, watching them float across a two-dimensional plane that seemed a mile long, fluttering and spinning, breathing through their larval gills, dying when the fragile balance of food, salt, water, and oxygen shifted ever so slightly. All this examination was so new in the 1970s that he and his colleagues were constantly coming across previously unknown species. Thanasis, being the only speaker of Greek in the lab, was often called over to a colleague’s microscope and asked to come up with a scientific name that matched the weird organism on the slide. “That dorsal fin looks like a bridge,” one of them would say. “Thanasis, what’s the Greek word for ‘bridge’?”

  Years of watching the dance of larval fish had taught him that nature’s winnowing is most likely to take place at this delicate, hypersensitive stage. But later, off the coast of Sicily, his boat full of tiny sea bass, Thanasis felt he was past all that. The fish in his barrels lashed to the gunnels of his borrowed boat, were three inches long—they were already survivors. The Italians had already paid the price of the initial attrition in growing them out to fingerling size. In his view the Italians had taken the risk, and Thanasis was going to get the windfall by growing them out to market size and selling them at a tremendous profit. Poetic justice for a Greek who had seen his home sea emptied of wild bass by Greece’s greatest classical rival.

  All these thoughts must have been on Thanasis’s mind as the mountains
of Sicily faded into the distance. Which is when the wind started to blow. . . .

  Before a strong wind blows on the Mediterranean, a crystal-clear sky is usually observed over the dark purple blue plain of the sea. Such was the case as Sicily dropped behind Thanasis’s boat. By nightfall all that had changed when a freak early summer storm hit. Soon a force-seven wind was blowing up behind the boat, driving the prow down under the waves. The sea bass in their ad hoc barrels were secured to the side of the boat with heavy chain and fine-meshed screens over the tops to keep them from sloshing into the sea. But the oxygen tanks that were aerating the water were listing in their housings and pulling at the hoses that led down into the water. Thanasis and the captain stayed inside the wheelhouse while the tanks clanked ominously against one another. If they were to become detached from their hoses, the fish would surely die.

  Staring out the window of the wheelhouse at twenty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of sea bass fingerlings proved too much for Thanasis. Holding on to the stays of the mainsail, he pulled himself out onto the deck of the boat. Waves running across the bow blew up into clouds of spray, sending stinging salt into his eyes. Gazing out over the chaotic scene, he could see what looked like an oxygen tank rolling back and forth over the hose that fed into the live wells. He crawled on his hands and knees and reached out for the tank. It rolled away from his fingers, then back, then away again. Finally he made one last lunge and held on to its edge. But just as he did so, the captain grabbed his shoulder and pulled him inside. “It’s not worth it,” the captain said. “It’s not worth going to the bottom of the sea for a bunch of fish.”