Four Fish

by Paul Greenberg

  On and on the wind blew throughout the night, turning the boat round and round. All headings were lost in the wind, and the darkness and the night seemed as if they would never end. But end they did. A rosy-fingered dawn began to glow in the east. Thanasis and the captain staggered on deck.

  “What is the first question a sailor asks when he is in trouble?” Thanasis wondered aloud to me two decades later, before deftly filleting a cooked sea bass we were sharing for lunch. He raised his substantial eyebrows for the punch line. “You might think this sailor would ask, ‘Do I have anything to drink?’ or ‘Do I have any food?’ But no. That’s not what he asks. What he asks is, ‘Where am I?’ ”

  In the distance on that frightening June morning in 1982, they could see a headland of sorts, but it was unclear if it was an island or a continent. And since orientation has a strange persistence in the human mind (i.e., what started out as south on the port side must still be south, even though you have turned in a hundred circles since that initial orientation was fixed), Thanasis felt a knot in the his gut. He felt sure that this land could be nothing other than Mu’ammar al-Gadhafi’s Libya, directly to the south of Sicily and a famed pirate haven at the time. How would he ever get the boat back to the Greek entrepreneur who had loaned it to him? Why the hell had he abandoned the life of a simple oceanographic researcher to become a fish farmer?

  But as they approached the land, the outline of a familiar house came into view. It was a large, many-windowed cottage with the characteristically jade green Ionian shutters, still closed up tight from the previous night’s storm. It looked just like a house Thanasis knew well, the house of an acquaintance named Claudatos, who lived on a promontory overlooking his home harbor. “My God,” Thanasis whispered, “could that actually be Claudatos’s house?” He waved and shouted, and soon Claudatos himself emerged onto the portico, waving back, the morning sun glinting pleasantly off his bald head. The wind, like some kind of Athena-driven lackey god, had blown the boat safely back to Cephalonia. Thanasis embraced his captain and breathed a vast sigh of relief. It was only then that he noticed that one of the oxygen tanks had come to rest on the aeration hose leading into the sea bass tanks. The hose was kinked, and the tank had pinched it closed. Peering apprehensively into the barrels, Thanasis saw, in miniature, the scene he’d beheld after the Italians had dynamited his home reefs: thousands of tiny sea bass, their swim bladders filled with gas, floating belly-up in the water, suffocated to death.

  But Thanasis discovered that amid all these dead fish a few in each tank had survived even without oxygen. He counted the fish one by one. There were exactly 2,153 survivors. These few fish, selected by their ability to withstand stress and oxygen deprivation, were to be the founders of a global race of sea bass.

  The ring tone on Thanasis Frentzos’s mobile phone is an excerpt from a radio broadcast of the 2004 European Football Championship. In that game Greece, an eighty-to-one long shot, played the vastly superior Portuguese team to a 0-0 draw for almost the entire match. Finally, with just a few minutes to go, Angelos Charisteas sprang into the air and headed a corner kick into the right side of the net. “Goaaaaaaallllll! Greece one, Portugal zero!” screams Thanasis Frentzos’s mobile phone when someone wants to get hold of him.

  A last-minute victory against long odds is exciting to all small nations. But Greeks feel such a victory with particular pride and sense of justice. As the very founders of the scientific method, many Greeks believe they should lead the world, and after so many years as Europe’s lowliest economy, they rejoice heartily at any successes that come their way.

  Such was the victory Thanasis had been hoping to pull off on his trip to Sicily. Though much of the work on sea bass taming had been done prior to his trip, the industry had yet to take off, and here, Thanasis thought, was his opening. He set about raising his 2,153 fish in a manner that would maximize their survival.

  Early on, though, he encountered a problem he couldn’t seem to solve. After the first breeding of the initial tribe of fish, nearly 50 percent emerged with crooked backbones. While the fish were perfectly edible, they were unappealing, especially in a culture that prefers to have its fish served whole. In fact, the weird shape of these first cultured marine fish was to give rise to fallacious speculation throughout Europe that fish were being genetically engineered. It was a serious problem, and Frentzos applied his small staff to solving it as quickly as possible. “We couldn’t figure out why it was happening,” Frentzos recalled. “Is it cancer?” he wondered. It got to the point where desperate ideas were being thrown out. “I know,” Thanasis ventured at one point, “the fish don’t have enough vitamin C!”

  Indeed, besides breeding, nutrition had been the next biggest bottleneck in taming sea bass. When they emerge from their eggs, the lack of a significant yolk sac makes them extremely vulnerable. They must immediately find something to hunt. But because they are so underdeveloped, lacking functioning eyes and equipped only with rudimentary nostrils, the only way they can locate prey is by using their neuron-rich lateral lines to sense the vibrations prey creates when it moves. In nature, sea bass are born right after the hatch of phytoplankton, microscopic algae that in turn act as fodder for tiny animals called zooplankton. The zooplankton wriggle with vigor during the halcyon days, luring sea bass to hunt them down.

  The logical thing for fish farmers to have done would have been to grow zooplankton in captivity. But in some ways, zooplankton is as difficult to domesticate as sea bass. Eventually a different creature was found that could in effect merge the phytoplankton and zooplankton food chain into a single link. This class of creature was the freshwater animal called the rotifer. Initially considered a nuisance species that plagued Chinese carp growers, fouling their ponds and circulation systems, rotifers were at first merely skimmed off the surface of the water and discarded. But eventually early fish farmers in Japan (another nation with extreme food-security concerns) realized that they could be used to feed very small juvenile fish.

  It was in France and Holland that the rotifer was perfected as early sea bass food. Pascal Divanach is a merry Frenchman hailing from Brittany who now makes his home on the island of Crete in Greece. Divanach descends from an old family deeply connected to the seafood industry. His brother has grown wealthy feeding fish to Europeans through the Clemon Accord Group, a seafood restaurant chain that is renowned throughout France. But it was Pascal and his fellow aquaculture researchers in France and Holland who figured out how to feed the fish that now feeds many Europeans.

  Divanach was invited to the Greek Institute of Oceanography in the 1980s and married a Greek woman soon after. Still proudly French, he delights in his adopted country and has a personal sense of pride in the Greek fish-farming industry. While seated in his office outside the town of Iráklion, he held up a promotional sticker for Greek aquaculture that said, FISH OF GREECE, FISH OF THE SUN. “It’s very beautiful, don’t you think?” He went on to explain to me what the French contributed to the taming of the sea bass.

  “The big advancement for sea bass culture was something we call the green-water effect,” Divanach told me. “In early systems they would introduce the rotifers and let them bloom. Because it was a closed system, bacteria would accumulate after twenty days and spread to the juvenile sea bass. In France we opened the system slightly. For one month the system was open to the sea to allow the refreshment of the environment with phytoplankton. This led to more food for the rotifers and better health and nutrition.”

  It was the idea of enrichment that led researchers to a vital discovery. Nutritionists knew that juvenile sea bass needed fats and proteins in their early diet. But if those fats and proteins were simply dumped into the water, juvenile sea bass would never be able to find them. It was the realization that a rotifer could be a perfect delivery system that proved critical. The very act of vibrating makes rotifers suitable “prey” for sea bass, compelling the sea bass to “hunt” and therefore acquire the fats and proteins that the rotifer
s contain. The final positive trait of rotifers is a rather strange quirk that makes them particularly useful to juvenile fish: rotifers possess an enzyme that causes them to literally digest themselves after death. This means that young sea bass, which early in life lack a full profile of digestive enzymes, can immediately get access to the nutrition contained within their miniature prey.

  But rotifers were only the first phase of the solution. Once juvenile sea bass were over a few millimeters, they were still not quite ready for industrial feed pellets but were too large for rotifers to sustain them. A second transitional feed had to be used. And the one the international fish-farming community eventually settled on was one that, curiously, was more known to devotees of comic books than to readers of scientific journals.

  Throughout the world, in the otherwise barren salt-lake ecosystems that occur in low-lying inland zones, a genus of tiny shrimp called artemia thrives. Because of the supersaline conditions of salt lakes, artemia produce hard, nearly impervious cysts that are fantastically tolerant to outside conditions. Artemia cysts over a million years old have been found and successfully hatched. The largest source of artemia in the world is the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and before marine aquaculture took off, there was an idiosyncratic mail-order marketer named Harold von Braunhut who popularized them.

  Von Braunhut was a man of many weird talents. He raced motorcycles under the name “The Green Hornet” and managed a showman whose act consisted of diving forty feet into a children’s wading pool filled with a foot of water. Originally of Jewish origin, he became a neo-Nazi and also invented X-Ray Specs—those red-threaded glasses that gave the wearer the impression of seeing through people’s skin into their internal organs. But von Braunhut’s most successful discovery was artemia. Since artemia eggs are so resistant to exterior conditions, von Braunhut reasoned they could easily be put in mail-order envelopes and sent around the world. All that was needed was a marketing name to make them attractive to consumers. He marketed them first in 1960 as “Instant Life” but in 1964 settled upon the name “Sea-Monkeys.” Von Braunhut invented a whole parallel universe for these creatures—swings, playpens, life histories—all advertised on the backs of comic books. The hardy cysts could be mailed to eager nine-year-olds and would arrive ready to hatch in almost any water condition.

  But European researchers realized that the best trick artemia could do was feed sea bass. The fact that they can be stored for years and then hatched at a predictable time makes artemia the ideal transitional feed for marine perciforms. Today the demand for artemia cysts is so great that overharvesting of them is now a major threat to the Great Salt Lake. One fish farmer I spoke with angrily compared the few nations who control the world’s artemia supply to OPEC. In the last ten years, the price of artemia cysts has risen exponentially.

  Both rotifers and artemia, though, have one quality that was causing Thanasis Frentzos’s fish to be deformed. When they are enriched, they are literally overflowing with nutritious oils—oils that seep out of the animals’ membranes and float to the surface of an aquaculture tank. Eventually Thanasis and his colleagues realized that it was these oils that were somehow interfering with the development of that key perciform organ the swim bladder. When the young fish were anesthetized for analysis, it was found that a good number of them simply sank to the bottom. Something was happening that wasn’t allowing the fish to correctly form their flotation devices.

  “We realized by carefully watching their behavior,” Frentzos told me, that “at thirteen or fourteen days old, the fish would swim to the surface. And it was here that they would sip a tiny bubble of air. When the fish are this young, the connection between their mouths and their swim bladders is still open, and so they can put air into their swim bladder—the air bubble is what forms the swim bladder in the first place. But what was happening was that in the feeding environment we had created, the fish couldn’t get to the surface. The oil from the feed was floating on the surface, preventing them from taking that first sip of air. And so we found that if we skimmed the oil off the top of the water, we would clear the way for them. Then they could take in their air properly before it was too late and they physiologically closed the barrier to the swim bladder.”

  All these developments would lead to greater and greater survival in the rearing of sea bass. Whereas in nature the survival of young was about one one-hundredth of a percent, by the time Frentzos had perfected his tank innovations, survival had risen to about 20 percent—a ten-thousand-fold improvement. And it was with these improvements that he was then able to make use of a uniquely Greek feature—the natural sea bass habitats of the Ionian Sea.

  While France does have a relatively long coastline, environmentalists’ resistance to near-shore fish farming combined with real-estate speculation meant that very few coastal sites were available for farming. Greece, on the other hand, is a natural for marine aquaculture. While Greece is ninety-sixth in the world in terms of overall land area, its shores are so intensely crimped and undulating that it is tenth in the world in total length of coast. No point on the mainland is farther than a hundred kilometers from the water, which means that fish grown near the shore can be easily and quickly shipped to major population centers.

  Lastly, and perhaps most critically, because of the high degree of crenellation in its coast, Greece is endowed with bays and harbors with extremely low “fetch.” Fetch is a nautical term meaning the distance over which wind-driven waves travel without encountering obstructions. The longer the fetch, the more powerful the waves, and the more powerful the waves, the more likely they are to destroy net cages suspended in the sea. Greece’s thousands of bays are fetchproof wonders—surrounded by abruptly high mountains. Because fetch is for most intents and purposes not an issue, the Greeks could construct fish cages out of flimsy, found material at low cost. When marine aquaculture began, there were no advanced engineering schemes for building in-water fish cages, and they came up with the simplest solution; as one Greek aquaculture scientist put it, “Four floating blue barrels nailed together with planks, with a net hanging below.”

  And so it was in Greece that all the different elements came together. The very considerable problems of breeding, juvenile feed, and habitat had been overcome. The stage was set for the sea bass to go global.

  The sea around Cephalonia is still largely empty of fish, and the fishermen who ply the waters live more off a 150-europer-day subsidy than off any of the fish they catch. But thanks to Frentzos, many of the bays and inlets have net cages hanging in them today, filled to the brim with sea bass. The first crops grew out successfully, so successfully that local restaurants during tourist season were pestering Frentzos constantly for fish. “It got to the point where I had to hide the fish from others. They all wanted my fish!”

  Word of Frentzos’s success spread. Some of his staff were poached by other companies. And soon there was a Greek sea bass gold rush going on. Large sea bass-farming companies emerged that became publicly traded behemoths. So new was it all that the Greek government itself turned to Frentzos, who, while only slightly ahead of his colleagues, was asked to help set regulations on farming sea bass in the Mediterranean. “Once one of the farmers nearby came to me,” Frentzos recalled, “and he asked me, ‘Thanasis, can you please tell these people that the walkway between my cages is wide enough? It’s sixty-eight centimeters and they’re telling me it has to be seventy-five centimeters. And when I asked why, they said it’s because you, Thanasis, have a walkway of seventy-five centimeters!’ ”

  The other problem that stemmed from the sea bass boom was disease and pollution. Unaware of how to control disease proliferation in fish, newcomers to fish farming were overwhelmed by a bacterial infection called vibriosis. Frentzos was one of the only farmers who had proper training in marine biology and was more or less spared. He sited his farms in places with strong moving currents and maintained a carefully sterile environment. One farmer, thinking that Thanasis had some hidden knowledge that he co
uld access, asked him for help. “I told him everything he had to do, but he wouldn’t listen,” Frentzos recalls, laughing. “He didn’t do any of it. Eventually he hired a witch to remove the evil eye from his farm. Believe me, I understand the evil eye. Sometimes you feel it, watching you like the cat watches the mouse. But in this case it wasn’t the evil eye. And this man, he went out of business.”

  But, like the French and the Israelis before him, Thanasis watched the market slip away from himself, too. During the ensuing years of the sea bass boom, being a good fish farmer with sound practices wasn’t always the thing that made you successful. Greece, as one of the poorer nations to achieve European Union membership, had access to huge amounts of “cohesion funds” meant to bring struggling economies into parity with stronger nations like Germany. In Greece a large portion of those cohesion funds went to the farming of European sea bass. Again, the goal was not to help Greece produce a sustainable product—rather, it was to help Greece make money and enter the European economic zone with as little pain as possible. Less sound farmers than Thanasis could mask their bad practices when they occurred by just throwing more EU money at any problem that came their way. The most opportunistic of these Greek companies used EU money to build sea bass empires that have spread outside their borders. From a place of extreme scarcity, where sea bass were a dwindling source of wild marine protein, they have grown markedly every year in their farmed form. Today Greece sends nearly a hundred million of those exactly plate-size fish to diners throughout Europe, the United States, and beyond every single year.

  Sea bass booms and busts now wash over the shores of the Mediterranean, rising and falling as profit margins get thinner and operations move to areas with weaker regulation and cheaper labor costs. From Turkey to Tunisia to Egypt they spread, and each time, as with the salmon industry in Canada and Norway, the same bad practices cause pollution, disease, and death. On each such occasion, emergency regulations are put in place to save the industry and the coast. Once upon a time, when sea bass were still rare, there was a profit margin of ten dollars per pound. Now that global production of sea bass approaches 200 million fish a year, the profit margin is down to half a cent per kilo.