Richard Ellis - Tuna: A Love Story

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Besides high prices, the bluefin commands an awed, almost mystical respect and devotion among those who know the animal most intimately. One says, If you talk to enough fishermen, you may sense how much we really love the bluefin and how much they mean to us. I think its the way the Indians felt about the buffalo. But people love the bluefin in different ways. Fishers, conservationists, governments, and international treaty organizations continually embroil themselves in bitter international struggles over control and salvation of the fishery.

CARL SAFINA, Song for the Blue Ocean

FOR A LONG TIME, I wrestled with titles for this book. I tried Horse Mackerel, The Quest for Tuna, The Perfect Fish, Maguro, Toro (sounded like a bullfight), and many other unsuitable candidates. Nothing conveyed what was the intended spirit of the book: the worlds best-loved fish (another rejected title) was in serious trouble. As Oscar Wilde said (although he was probably not referring to tuna), each man kills the thing he loves, and even as tuna are being killed in prodigious numbers, there are five public aquariums in Japan and one in California that exhibit large tuna swimming in large tanks. The spectators might thrill at the sight of these magnificent creatures, but they also might consider having a piece for supper. Everybody eats tuna and everybody loves it: white meat, light meat, red meat, in sandwiches and salads, raw in sashimi and sushi. The Japanese regard a slice of uncooked, bright red tuna (toro) as the most delectable food item it is possible to eat. Like many other fishes, tuna contains omega-3 fatty acids, which are particularly healthy. (Does it contain mercury? Well, yes, but the scientists and the tuna industry are still arguing about how much is bad for you, and that means you can keep eating it.) The fraternity of big-game fishermen and the writers who describe their exploits feel that tuna are among the worlds most magnificent animals; they speak of them with unrestrained reverence. To biologists, the tuna is the epitome of hydrodynamic excellence; it is fast, powerful, streamlined, and equipped with specializations that enable it to perform its duties better than any other fish in the ocean.

For the most part, the common terms for a group of animals are uninspired: a pack of wolves, a herd of cattle, a flock of birds, a pod of whales, and so on. But when James Lipton entitled his 1968 book An Exaltation of Larks, he managed to elevate group nomenclature from dull to dazzling. The term actually appears in a 1486 work of uncertain authorship called The Book of St. Albans, but it is likely that nobody before Lipton ever referred to a bunch of larks as an exaltation. (In my copy of The Book of St. Albans, a reprint annotated by Joseph Haslewood in 1810 and reprinted again in 1966 by Abercrombie & Fitch, the term is an Exaltynge of Larkys, which would appear to be exalting rather than exaltation, but never mind.) In fact, larks are not flocking birds, so the question of what to call a collection of them probably never came up. The European skylark, however, is renowned for its burbling, melodic flight song, considered one of the most beautiful sounds in nature, and therefore exaltation seems to fit nicely. In Shelleys To a Skylark, the blithe spirit pours forth profuse strains of unpremeditated art Wordsworths skylarks song is a flood of harmony, with instinct more divine and Frederick Tennyson (Alfreds brother) wrote (in The Skylark), How the blithe lark runs up the golden stairAnd all alone in the empyreal air, fills it with jubilant sweet songs of mirthIs it a bird or a star that shines and sings?

Most people think of a school of fish, and indeed, most of the tuna literature refers to aggregations of these fish as schools. My recommendations will not change the language, but I do feel that the mighty tuna deserves something better than the common collective that we use for minnows or sardines. Even if the term appears nowhere else but in a chapter heading of this book, I believe a celebration of tuna does justice to the character and accomplishments of these great fish, and for what its worth, I considered it as another possible title.

In the process of writing most of my earlier books on various marine creatures, I found that detailed information was often more than a little difficult to find. For The Book of Whales, originally published in 1980, I had to search for studies in obscure scientific journals, often written in a foreign language, to get information on, say, Brydes whale or Burmeisters porpoise. At that time, there was no comprehensive book about the whales and dolphins of the world; the closest thing was Beddards A Book of Whales, published in 1900. There were even some rare whales, known as beaked whales, about which hardly anything at all was known, and a beaked whale previously unknown to science was discovered in 1994.

There is altogether too much information about tuna. Commercial and recreational fishermen, ichthyologists, ecologists, fisheries biologists, nutritionists, conservationists, and aquaculturists all have something to say about tunausually bluefins, but there is also a lot of published information about yellowfins, skipjacks, and albacore. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (known as ICCAT, pronounced eye-cat) has published an almost endless series of reports, any and all of which are available to researchers, professional or amateur. You dont need special permission to enter the ICCAT website; all you have to do is open it (www.iccat.es), click on main menu and then publications, and you will find thousands upon thousands of discussions of everything about tuna (and swordfish, marlins, and sharks too). Many of the papers are specialized (Estimates of the Abundance and Mortality of West Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Using the Stock Synthesis Model), but there are also many user-friendly items, such as Jim Josephs Brief History of Tuna Research. If I had tried to use all the available material in the ICCAT reports, I would be reading into the next century, and if I ever finished reading, I would have to produce a five-thousand-page bookand then it would be too technical anyway. So I read a good many of the ICCAT papers (and much other stuff as well), and tried to condense the information into a book that could be read and understood by somebody who didnt happen to be an ichthyologist, a nutritionist, a chemist, or a fisheries biologist.

Many people in those professionsand lots of othershelped me in the preparation of this book: Al Anderson, Pete Barrett, Ted Bestor, Barbara Block, Roberto Mielgo Bregazzi, Jack Brink, Alex Buttigieg, Gary and Karen Cannell, Sienen Chow, Al Craig, Alessandro de Maddalena, Sylvia Earle, Jess Farley, Chuck Farwell, Harry Fierstine, Becky Goldburg, Jim Joseph, Molly Lutcavage, Terry Maas, Brian MacKenzie, Josu Martnez-Garmendia, Brad Matsen, Ron ODor, Gemma Parkes, Mike Rivkin, Carl Safina, Vern Scholey, Mike Stokesbury, Dan Sulmasy, Craig Van Note, John Volpe, and Gail Morchower of the International Game Fish Association. My old friend and new agent Steve Wasserman brought me and this book back to Knopf, where the book and I benefited enormously from the efforts of my editorand the editor of eight of my previous booksAsh Green. During the writing of this book and othersparticularly The Empty Ocean and