Four Fish

by Paul Greenberg

The other two people on the boat were men, widowers probably, in their seventies. Lonely, windblown characters whose isolation seemed mitigated only by the occasional fishing trip. As we steamed toward the grounds, one of them barraged me with round after round of fishing stories. How on one trip out to Nova Scotia he caught five bluefin tuna up to seven hundred pounds. How on another trip out of Rhode Island he had filled his gunny sacks with nearly a thousand pounds of cod fillets. I calculated all his many fishing trips in my head to come up with a total poundage of animal flesh taken. At least ten thousand pounds of fish must have perished at his hands, even though the average human needs only about four thousand pounds for his entire life. He interrupted me in the middle of my calculations.

  “Now the fishing’s no good,” he told me. “There’s nothing.”

  But within a few minutes of anchoring up and starting a chum slick, the same old man who had decried the nothingness in the waters beneath him saw his pole bend double with the ferocious opening gambit of a three-foot-long bluefish. Dogged and yellow-eyed, it fought hard until the mate stuck it with a killing stroke of the gaff. It landed on the deck with a thud.

  There is still a remarkable amount of diverse life in Long Island Sound. In fact, after catching one bluefish myself, I felt an unusual tug on my bait and then the telltale first run of something uncommon yet familiar. Within a few minutes, the mate helped me net a ten-pound striped bass. The first striped bass I had ever seen in Long Island Sound. A fish that was nearly absent from these waters in my youth. Other things that weren’t in the sound when I was a child also made an appearance this year. Seals abounded throughout the winter, and in May a school of several hundred dolphins came up the East River and poured into the sound’s waters, the first time such an event had occurred in fifty years. The captain of the Angler believed that this was because the dolphins had run out of food offshore, that the huge schools of menhaden they traditionally rely upon were being reduced to make omega-3 dietary supplements and salmon feed, leaving the dolphins to starve. But it also could be that dolphins have made a tremendous recovery themselves as laws on marine mammals have led to their greater protection. It’s too early to say. What can be said is that the ocean is both mysteriously dynamic and vastly productive. Never write off the wild ocean. It can always surprise you.

  By the middle of the trip, I was happy to see my daughter finally connecting with a bluefish of her own and cranking it in with exasperation. She had never hooked a fish this powerful. When it came up to the side of the boat, her eyes widened with amazement. “Can we keep it?” she asked. I thought about it. Bluefish are, in a way, a perfect symbol of wildness. They are good to eat if they are eaten immediately—they degrade and putrefy within a day or two. They would never make a good “industrial fish.” I figured that between smoking them and giving some away, a total of three or four fish would be the right amount to take home, even though our legally allotted limit would be twenty. I gave my assent, and the mate gaffed the fish and threw it into the box.

  Just as he did this, the old man who had decried the lack of fish sidled up to me.

  “You know, you can take mine home, too. I don’t eat fish.”

  The captain and I stared at him, dumbfounded. This old man who had complained of there being “no more fish” had already killed at least six large bluefish and seemed intent on killing more. To what end?

  In former times the captain of a party boat would have shrugged his shoulders and allowed the killing to continue unabated. It is the pleasure of his fares and their regular business that is his quarry. But this captain, a man of my age who moonlighted as a high-school science teacher, was well aware of the peril facing fish and the need for restraint, care, and rationality.

  “Okay, folks,” he said, “we’re not killing any more fish.” The gaffs were put away and nets were brought down from the decks above. Moments later my daughter hooked into the largest bluefish of the night. Back and forth it ran, dragging her up and down the starboard side of the boat, around the stern, and then up the port side. As she strained to crank the handle of reel, I felt I knew her thoughts: “I want to possess this thing of great power and beauty. To make it mine and to become its master.” Those would have been my thoughts thirty years ago were I standing in her shoes. But as the net came down and drew the fish in, she moved back from the rail. I saw in her the bud of rationality and the logic of both pursuing and saving fish. To know the power of wildness intimately and, at the same time, to recognize the right of that wildness to continue.

  The mate brought the fish over the side in the net and then ran to attend to another customer. I carefully drew the bluefish out and kept my fingers away from its snapping jaws. Holding it by the back of the head, I felt the raw power in its muscles—unwieldy, wild, dangerous. I worked the hook from the corner of its mouth and then in one fluid motion put the fish back over the rail. It darted at lightning speed out of sight. The only reminder of it was a wake of phosphorescence as it bounced against some jellyfish and slipped into the depths.

  “Will it live?” my daughter asked me, staring into the sea below.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding slowly. “Yes, I think it will.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In a book of this nature, an author’s interviewees are as much teachers as they are sources of quotable information. For the instruction I received, I would like to offer up my thanks to the biologists, ecologists, fishermen/women, writers, and aquaculturists who opened their doors and offered their expertise during the course of my research. Particular thanks for my frequent impositions are extended to Carl Safina, Ted Ames, Daniel Pauly, Mark Kurlansky, Orri Vigfússon, Jon Rowley, Yonathan Zohar, Kwik’pak Fisheries and the Yupik Nation, Tara Duffy, Jeremy Brown, Adam LaRosa and Canyon Runner Sportfishing, D. Graham Burnett, Steve Gephard, Matt Steinglass, Neil Sims, Trevor Corson, Vikki Spruill and the organizers of Sea Web’s annual Seafood Summit, the Helenic Centre for Marine Research, the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Also most appreciated: the material and structural support provided by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the Food and Society Policy Fellowship program, the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship Program, and the Bogliasco Foundation’s Liguria Study Center. In the editorial realm, I extend my thanks to the early publishers of my fish writing—first to Tim Coleman, who ran my first stories in the New England edition of The Fisherman back when I was fifteen years old; and later Alexander Star, Gerald Marzorati, Jennifer Schuessler, Amanda Hesser, and Carmel McCoubrey at the New York Times. For the editing of the present work, much appreciation and admiration go out to Ann Godoff, Jane Fleming, and Helen Conford at The Penguin Press. The unofficial editorial advice of Cressida Leyshon, Sean Wilsey, John Donohue, David Gold, and David “Mas” Masumoto was also quite helpful. My research assistant, Kayla Montanye, deserves special mention for her hard work on what I hope will be the first step in a long career in environmental writing. Warm thanks to my fellow fisherman, friend, and agent, David McCormick, who saw the literary possibilities in a fish book long before anyone else, and to my many friends and colleagues who weighed in on the manuscript as it advanced. And of course thanks to my mother, who managed to get me a boat when she was broke, and to my father, who took me fishing when he had no time.

  Lastly, much love and thanks to someone who provided the continents of emotional support necessary for a man diving into oceans. Thank you, Esther, for your love and patience.

  NOTES

  xi “Fish is the only grub”: The quotation is attributed to one “Hugh G. Flood,” a composite character created by the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell in a series of articles he wrote about the Fulton Fish Market, later collected as the semifictional account Old Mr. Flood. The Flood stories were subsequently anthologized in Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992).

  INTRODUCTION

  11 principal meats: My summaries of animal breeding and t
he histories of domestication derive from Trygve Gjedrem, Selection and Breeding Programs in Aquaculture (New York: Springer, 2005).

  12 “It would appear that every wild animal”: Francis Galton as cited in Juliet Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). In addition to his writing on eugenics, animal domestication, and many other topics, Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin and is considered to be one of the founders of the school of statistical genetics.

  12 around 90 million tons: Most of my larger macro-level fisheries data are drawn from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s latest biennial report The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008, ed. J.-F. Pulvenis de Séligny, A. Gumy, and R. Grainger (Rome: FAO, 2009), http://www.fao.org/docrep/011/i0250e/i0250e00.htm. The marine ecologist Daniel Pauly and others have repeatedly stressed that the Republic of China’s overestimation of aquaculture production and wild catch could significantly skew the overall global data in FAO’s statistics. In particular, Pauly takes issue with the assessment that aquaculture is now 50 percent of the world’s seafood supply and warns that the actual number may be much lower. While I agree that the data may be skewed, the trend of the rise of aquaculture is unmistakable. If we have not reached a point of 50% aquacultured seafood by now we surely will reach that number within a decade or two.

  12 if history were written by fish: The observation that World War II represented a reprieve for groundfish in the North Atlantic is based on an interview conducted with Daniel Pauly in the summer of 2005. Other researchers, most notably Jeff Hutchinson at Dalhousie University, disagree on this point. Whether or not a difference in groundfish numbers before and after World War II can be quantified, it is nevertheless undeniable that fishing pressure declined during the war and that fishing pressure, globally, increased progressively from 1950 through the present day.

  13 “natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial”: Garrett Hardin’s oft-quoted essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” was first published in Science, vol. 162, no. 3859 (Dec. 13, 1968), p. 1243, and can be easily accessed at http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html.

  SALMON

  16 as many as 100 million Connecticut River salmon larvae: Data on Connecticut River salmon estimates come from Steve Gephard, director of the State of Connecticut DEP Inland Fisheries Division’s Diadromous Fish Program. Salmon restoration on the Connecticut River has at times elicited critical comments, and some have asserted that salmon were never particularly abundant in the Connecticut River because the river’s mouth is rather far south in comparison to Atlantic salmon’s typical range. Gephard maintains that a large portion of the river’s upper reaches are well within the more comfortable latitudes for Atlantic salmon. “We have generated population estimates based on the amount of habitat available to the species (pre-European Contact),” Gephard wrote me in 2009, “and then used production and return rates from the scientific literature to develop estimates on how many salmon that habitat would produce. We came up with 40,000 adults annually. This also seems to jibe with estimates of other rivers in the region. We can never prove it but the salmon biologists in the area seem comfortable with that estimate.”

  17 compounds that have the unique capacity to keep muscle and vascular tissue pliant: The role of the omega-3 fatty acid in salmon physiology is drawn from a 2009 interview with Frederic T. Barrows, research physiologist, USDA, Hagerman Fish Culture Experiment Station, Hagerman, ID.

  18 in advance of their spawning runs: Overviews of salmon life cycles, migrations, and evolutionary history can be found in David R. Montgomery, The King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon (Cambridge, MA: Westview Books, 2003), and James A. Lichatowich, Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999).

  18 “The King of Fish”: “The mighty Luce or Pike is taken to be the tyrant, as the salmon is king, of the fresh waters,” wrote Izaak Walton. Though his metaphorical intentions are open to interpretation, tryants and kings would have most certainly been on Walton’s mind following his exile from London and Cromwell’s execution of Charles II. Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 2009).

  18 But in 1798: Smaller dams were put across the Connecticut’s tributaries before the dam at Turners Falls that undoubtedly reduced salmon populations. Turners Falls was, however, the first mainstem blocking. Salmon spawned below the Turners Falls dam, but the Turners Falls impediment was clearly the death knell to the run. For more background on Atlantic salmon on the Connecticut, see Montgomery, The King of Fish.

  19 after a handful of Danish and Faroe Islands fishermen: A detailed account of Greenland catches made by Danish and Faroese fishermen is given in Anthony Netboy, The Salmon: Their Fight for Survival (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

  20 California closed its salmon fishery: The closure of the continental U.S. salmon fisheries was reported in “Salmon Fishing Closed for California, Oregon,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 11, 2008.

  20 human-controlled reproduction of Atlantic salmon: A thorough summary of trends in European medieval fisheries, including a mention of the first salmon culture around the year 1400, is Richard C. Hoffman, “A Brief History of Aquatic Resource Use in Medieval Europe,” Helgoland Marine Research, vol. 59, no. 1 (Apr. 2005), http://www.springerlink.com/content/69w8p244fu6lmwa2. It is also worth noting that much of early salmon culture, including significant hatchery operations in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth century, was designed to supplement declining or extirpated wild populations of salmon and trout, not to form the basis of commercial farms. Stock supplementation of many fish, particularly trout, is a common though controversial practice, and today most seemingly “wild” trout in the United States and Europe begin their lives in hatcheries.

  20 companies operating in the frigid fjords of southern Chile: Salmon farming and wild salmon catch data, specifically tonnage and market share, are derived primarily from the World Wildlife Fund, The Great Salmon Run: Competition Between Wild and Farmed Salmon, ed. Gunnar Knapp, Cathy A. Roheim, and James L. Anderson, http://www.uri.edu/cels/enre/ENRE_Salmon_Report.html, 2007.

  25 Yukon king-salmon returns dropped far below: The Alaska State Department of Fish and Game keeps careful records of salmon catches on a region-by-region basis and publishes them at http://www.cf.adfg.state.ak.us. Additional information on Alaska’s salmon management methodology came from in-person interviews with Alaska Fish and Game departments in Emmonak, Alaska, as well as in the Bristol Bay salmon fishery. Howard Klein, then chairman of Ocean Bounty provided background on large-scale commercial use of salmon via an in-person interview in the summer of 2007.

  26 Before the Industrial Revolution, the world’s population: As the reader will see in my discussion of cod in chapter 3, it is extremely difficult to try to reconstruct historical fish populations, largely because habitat destruction and overfishing tend to have occurred before anyone has the impetus or means to count fish in the first place. Steve Gephard (cited above) wrote that while it is possible to look at catch histories of salmon, “(1) landings never equate to population size and (2) by the 1960s [when landing records start to become available] many salmon runs (like the Connecticut) had already been extirpated and other runs were decimated by dams, pollution, and overharvest in home waters. The North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization is working on a river database but it is not ready yet. It will include a list of all Atlantic salmon rivers in the world with some estimate of the amount of historical habitat. Once you have a list of all habitat, you could apply a theoretical production rate (e.g., 4 smolts per one production unit of habitat) and then a theoretical marine return rate (e.g., 0.01) and come up with a very rough estimate of the number of salmon historically. But we are years away from that.” The prehistory of salmon is therefore often expressed as an inventory of different factors that caused salmon decline and an extrapol
ation of the probable loss of total fish. One such meta-analysis is in Frank Jensen, “Synopsis on the abundance of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) since the last ice age,” Millenium Report of the Museum of Natural History (Aarhus, Denmark: Museum of Natural History, March 20, 1991). Jensen offers no numbers for the total historical population of salmon but approximates a 99 percent decline from the last ice age through the present era with the steepest declines taking place in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

  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.