One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
Enrico
Ahh. The Ocean. Huge, limitless, mysterious, perhaps even unknowable-or so I used to think. But the intense focus on the sea in recent years and the growing currency of phrases like “the domestication of the seas” have created in me a very different view. The Pacific, the Atlantic, the Arctic and the Indian, it seems, are becoming big, liquid farms. What can that possibly mean for us, for fisheries and for all the creatures who live in the deep, deep blue?
One More Dead Fish, a Media That Matters: Good Food film, looks at the controversy between handliners (fishermen who fish with poles and lines) and industrial fishing in Nova Scotia. One of the facts that struck me is that industrial ships use nets large enough to fit several jumbo jets. It may seem obvious, but these nets do not discriminate. In the process, they pick up many creatures and plants that the fisheries can’t use, or that are illegal to keep. The industry’s solution is to dump tons of dead animals and waste back into the sea.
Paul Greenberg, a frequent writer on fish and such, has recently written a couple of articles that I dug, both appeared in the New York Times. “Spawn Fish” tells of the great differences in salmon species in Alaska’s Yukon River. It’s not all just “wild.” Then there’s Greenberg’s fun and odd-ball calculation of the impact of Ernest Hemingway’s fishing expeditions on today’s fish count ocean-wide. Could 250 marlin and 65 bluefish tuna caught at the hands of Hemingway really affect the current and long-term prospects of these fish? Read the article and find out.
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