Intertwined biographies of man and fish

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, fishing, tuna, fish tagging, biographies

What a title to begin with: Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas, the new book by Karen Pinchin, chronicles the life of Al Anderson, the most prolific tagger of tunas and other fish, along with the natural history of bluefin tunas and the life of one particular fish that oceanographers named Amelia. In Mr. Anderson's website about the tagging of bluefin tuna, the fish in this photo is said to be Amelia, a fish that was first caught and tagged as a juvenile (the tag is the orange thingy hanging below the forward dorsal fin), then caught three more times; the records of her catch locations, and locations logged by a data logger upon her second "encounter" with oceanographers, robustly demonstrated that bluefin tuna range right across the Atlantic Ocean. This blew a big hole in a decades-old "two populations" convention that governed the catch quotas of fishing fleets. There is only one population of Atlantic bluefin tuna.

There! How's that for a spoiler? This lovely book winds together the lives of Al Anderson, his love of fishing, his eventually greater love of using tagging to gather scientific data about tunas, and the lives of the tunas themselves and Amelia in particular. Bluefin tunas went from being considered trash fish to become nearly the most valuable sea animal, on a dollars-per-pound basis. When big money is in play, old laws that permit or encourage overexploitation become deeply entrenched and unchangeable.

In the middle of the book the author notes in passing that bluefin tunas have chromatophores in their skin, and they can exhibit color and pattern changes similar to those of a squid. Note the skin pattern on Amelia in the photo. In most pictures showing a bluefin tuna, the blue-above-white color scheme is smooth, usually because the fish is dead. Amelia appears agitated, as a fish out of water ought to be! She lived another dozen or so years, and by her final capture and death in Portugal she weighed perhaps 600 pounds.

The book's title mentions obsession. Everything about fishing touches obsession: Al's obsessive love of fishing as a young man; his equally obsessive tagging program that began not that much later; the obsession of sushi-lovers for bluefin nigiri; the obsession for money that drives the entire bluefin fishery… The list goes on. Few people consider the tuna's obsession with staying alive.

Funny side note: We once met an elderly woman in South Dakota, who asked if I liked to fish. I don't, but I've done it whenever someone asks me along. I replied to her that I had fished a little, but I wasn't good at it, and that catching fish seemed to cost me more than going to the store to buy fish. She snorted, "Nobody fishes for economic reasons!" She loved to fish. I have my own obsessions, just not fishing!

In this case, a cluster of obsessions is driving the bluefin tuna to extinction. The future is bleak for this species.