Four Fish

by Paul Greenberg

  3. The global protection of unmanageable species. Species or stocks that straddle too many nations or that occur in unowned, international waters have been shown with very few exceptions to be unmanageable over the long term. In the face of hard science, politicians of multiparty treaties “negotiate” catch allocations that go against scientific reality. Developing nations balk at not being given their “fair share” of these depleted stocks, but if a species shows continued decline over time, as has the Atlantic bluefin tuna, the only “fair” thing to do is to completely close the fishery. In some cases it may be advisable to consider certain species simply too valuable to hunt. If bluefin tuna were elevated and accorded the same kind of protection tigers, lions, whales, and other sensitive trans-boundary species are given, it could shift public perception of fish and give regulators a line in the sand past which a species is simply not allowed to decline.

  4. The protection of the bottom of the food chain. With the boom of aquaculture and the rise in the use of fish as feed for pigs and chickens, small forage fish like anchovies, sardines, capelin, and herring now represent the largest portion of fish caught. All of these fish are in greater and greater numbers being ground up in reduction facilities and recast as food for fish farms and terrestrial farming operations. And yet we really do not understand the population dynamics of these smaller forage fish, and we do not really know how to manage them. With the scaling-up of so much aquaculture, we run the very real risk of what Dr. Ellen Pikitch of the Pew Oceans Commission called “pulling the rug out from underneath marine ecosystems”—that is, removing the basic food source of the ocean and causing fisheries collapses from below.

  According to Pikitch, ecosystem models of forage/predator systems are increasingly showing that intact wild systems are more valuable in raw dollars than are systems converted to aquaculture. When small forage fish are left unharvested, the resulting catch of bigger commercial species that eat those forage animals is greater. There is simply more food in the water, more energy in the system, and that energy is translated into more and bigger fish.

  We must therefore take a precautionary approach to the very bottom of the oceanic food chain and exploit those animals only after models have been developed that indicate the extent of removals that the system will tolerate. We must also seek to rebuild the bottom of the food chain we have already lost by restoring the habitats where forage fish are born and reared. Estuaries and river systems are vital zones of food production and not simply “natural” spaces. Nearly every wild fish highlighted in this book—striped bass, European sea bass, cod, Alaska pollock, Atlantic and Pacific salmon, bluefin tuna—depends upon a supply of forage fish whose life cycles are in turn dependent upon rivers and estuaries. Herring, menhaden, smelt—all these small fish are the silver coin, the coin of the marine realm, and their hatching and rearing often occur in direct association with access to rivers that enter the sea. Restoring these areas increases the food supply for the fish we eat most. Deny the restoration and no matter how much conservation occurs at sea, abundance will inevitably be limited by a low ceiling of limited food.

  Four very good, noble, and ultimately effective principles that will rebuild the seas. Goals that are more and more becoming part of a new phenomenon taking root in conservation policy, that of “ocean zoning.” As more users compete for space in the ocean, some places in the world (the island of Asinara off Sardinia and the state of Massachusetts, for example) have implemented overall zoning goals, much in the same way municipalities plan a town with commercial space, green space, and residential areas. The advantage of zoning the ocean now is that it gives wild-fish advocates a chance to stake out territory before wildness has been relegated too far to the margins. Hand in hand with ocean zoning is the rising trend of “ecosystem management.” Rather than managing individual species, ecosystem management seeks to manage entire systems, modeling patterns for fishing and restoration that work toward reestablishing the balance of the many demands of prey and predator.

  But all the very good and noble goals of ocean zoning and ecosystem management become meaningless in the presence of one ominous factor: human demand.

  In spite of campaigns, boycotts, publications, documentaries, and every other means of persuasion known, the global human population keeps growing and humans keep eating more fish every year, not just in aggregate but on a per capita basis. Even with so many warnings about mercury and PCBs, the world nearly doubled its per-person fish consumption in the last half century, from twenty pounds per year in the 1960s to thirty-six pounds in 2005. And because seafood is such a global, boundary-free business, whenever a restaurant, a city, or a country takes to the moral high ground and tries to reduce or improve the footprint of its seafood consumption, another, less scrupulous restaurant, city, or nation is ready to step in and continue the bad practices that the more evolved parties have abandoned.

  So if we take as a given that humankind will keep eating fish, more and more of it every year, then we need to come up with a way to direct that appetite away from sensitive, unmanageable wildlife and usher it toward sustainable, productive domesticated fish. A small-scale, artisanal, wild-fish fishery would be a great thing that could inevitably lead to better protection of wild fish. But a small-scale artisanal fishery will never have the industrial capacity of the supertrawlers that decimated the Georges Bank and Grand Banks codfish stocks.

  What is needed above all is a standard for boosting fish supplies in as sustainable a manner as possible. Humans should purposefully select a handful of fish species that can stand up to industrial-size husbandry with the goal of compensating for the huge gap between wild supply and growing human demand. Of course, if the global human population continues to grow unabated, no solution will work; in such a population-growth scenario, only the stars can save us. Indeed, with terrestrial food production now reaching its limits, the ocean is, in a sense, the final option, the only remaining way for humans to convert more of the world’s biomass and sun energy into more humans. The future of human growth depends largely on how we manage our ocean.

  We therefore have a very clear choice. We can carefully select the fish that work well both in conjunction with human farmers and alongside the wild ocean food systems that still function. Or we can run roughshod over the wild ocean, install feedlots up and down the world’s coasts, and continue to reap short-term calorie credits irrespective of the long-term ecological debits. If humans are at root rational creatures, then we must without question choose the former path over the latter.

  It makes sense therefore to return to and expand upon postulates of an earlier era, to revisit the precepts that Francis Galton posed at the dawn of the industrialization of terrestrial animal husbandry. Galton spoke of wild animals outside the dominion of humankind as “doomed to be gradually destroyed off the face of the Earth as useless consumers of cultivated produce.” But with the ocean we need both the undomesticated and the domesticated sides of fish to carry forward. It seems, then, that a new set of principles for the ocean has to be made, one inclusive of wild systems, systems as nourishing as they are mysterious. We cannot make up for the elimination of our wild-food calories with farmed replacements. We need both—for our nutritional as well as our emotional well-being.

  For too long it has been entrepreneurs who have decided which species to domesticate and which to leave wild. Their decisions have been based on market principles and profit, and they have historically not consulted with the managers and biologists who study wild-fish dynamics. This is senseless. If we continue along this pathway, we will only destroy one food system and replace it with another, inferior one, just as we have already done in most of the world’s freshwater lakes and rivers. We therefore need a set of principles that guide us forward with domestication, one that is inclusive of impacts on wild oceans. I would propose that the next animals from the sea we domesticate should be:

  1. Efficient. In an increasingly stretched world of food resources, we cannot afford fis
h that require more feed to produce a pound of edible flesh than do our most efficient terrestrial animals. Fish, by their very nature, should be more efficient than land animals. Fish do not have to warm their bodies, and they do not have to stand against gravity. All that energy that is wasted in mammals and birds could and should be redirected into growing fish flesh. Thus the warm-blooded bluefin tuna, whose current feed-conversion ratio can exceed twenty to one, should be abandoned as mass-scale farm animals. If a fish like a Kona Kampachi can be produced with similar fresh density at a fraction of that feed conversion, why pursue the tuna?

  2. Nondestructive to a wild system. With salmon there is ample evidence to suggest that the culture of farmed variants in close proximity to wild strains can negatively affect wild populations over time. Indeed, if one compares the fate of Atlantic salmon with that of the American striped bass, two fish that were dangerously reduced in the wild and then domesticated, it is instructive to compare their respective fates. Wild salmon populations have generally declined in Maine, Atlantic Canada, and Europe in areas where they interact with farmed salmon. American striped bass, meanwhile, have staged a strong recovery in the wild even in the presence of an aquaculture program that now accounts for 60 percent of all striped bass consumed. The difference? The fish called “farmed striped bass” is a sterile hybrid created by crossing a female striped bass with a male of a related freshwater species called white bass. The farmed hybrid striped bass cannot interbreed with the wild population of striped bass and thus cannot spread its genes beyond the farm. Furthermore, the hybrid striped bass is grown exclusively in freshwater ponds away from the migration lanes of wild striped bass. Wild populations are thus buffered against contracting farm-born diseases.

  If the same separation of wild and farmed fish took place with salmon, the remaining populations of wild salmon might do better. Critics argue that the cost of putting salmon in a closed, recirculating system like that used for Josh Goldman’s barramundi would make farmed salmon simply too expensive for the average consumer to afford. This is the logical place for subsidies. If we must subsidize fish consumption, then it certainly makes sense to subsidize those practices we know will contribute to a net gain of fish in the world, not cause the destruction of wild stocks. In certain cases—like Chile, for example—where wild salmon are not endemic and there is no obvious impact upon an existing native population, perhaps open-cage salmon farming could still be allowed. But even there the problems of sea lice and infectious salmon anemia are very clear environmental signs that fish should not be farmed too densely and without careful siting procedures. Less-dense stocking of fish farms will cause price increases, but again, this is where subsidies could help to level the playing field.

  3. Limited in number. After the technological breakthroughs on feed, reproduction, and husbandry techniques of the 1970s and ’80s, it is now theoretically possible to tame pretty much any fish in the sea. In light of this, we have to be on guard against a certain kind of “Gee whiz, I can do it!” behavior among aquaculture researchers. Just because we can tame a fish doesn’t mean we should. Every time a species is brought into culture, new diseases specific to that species or sometimes that genus can develop and spread to related wild populations. Furthermore, new hurdles present themselves with every new species, and a tremendous amount of time and energy is wasted in the early phases of domestication. Instead of constantly trying to bring new species into an imperfect culture merely because we can, we should instead choose just a handful of animals whose rearing we can perfect. Why farm cod when tilapia is already doing the job? Subtle differences in flesh texture, taste, and nutritional content are controllable through feed and rearing techniques and do not require the taming of a new species. If we want variety of species for niche markets, let that variety be provided by small-scale, sustainable wild fisheries.

  4. Adaptable. In the debate on aquaculture, environmentalists have frequently taken the position that we should not be farming carnivorous fish, because their overall footprint is larger than that of mostly herbivorous fish like carp and tilapia. Two and sometimes more trophic levels of food consumption have to take place before a salmon gains nutrition from a sardine. Point taken. But the same argument has been made before, most notably with vegetarianism. For many decades now, environmentalists have argued that if all humans were vegetarian, humanity would have a fraction of its current footprint on the globe. I have tried vegetarianism, inspired by this irrefutable logic. And yet I have drifted back to carnivorism, as have many before me. Rather than hoping to change the world by changing consumption patterns, regulations and farm-level reforms need to be put into effect so that unsustainable food doesn’t reach the market in the first place. And where better to start this process than with the world’s most commonly farmed fish, salmon? On the downside, it seems unlikely that the environmental community will succeed in dislodging the salmon industry from its dominant position in the farmed-seafood sector. On the upside, salmon do seem to have an adaptability to alternative feeds. Seaweeds and soy are increasingly forming the basis of salmon diets and could replace fish meal altogether in the not-too-distant future. As of this writing, at least one company has developed a completely algae-based feed that replaces the need for fish oil and meal in the diets of salmonids. The problem? Once again, cost. Here is another place for subsidies to play a positive role. Let governments make up for the difference in price between wild-fish meal and synthetic algal feeds until the industry has scaled up. It is an investment in the future.

  5. Functional in a polyculture. If there is one lesson that has been learned from terrestrial agriculture, it is that monocultures of crops are susceptible to disease and can cause undue environmental degradation. Rather than starting from zero and redoing all of terrestrial agriculture’s mistakes, we should start from a place of polyculture, where wastes are recycled as much as possible, where space is maximized for the growing of food, and where systems instead of individual species are mastered.

  Five principles, then, to lead us to our selection of domesticated animals from the sea. The animals that could and should rightfully be called our “sea food.”

  As to what we should call wild fish in the future, I leave that to the marketers of what I hope will someday be a more informed and thoughtful fishing industry. But I would suggest that if we continue to eat wild fish, we need to find a new way of identifying them in the marketplace. A set of terms that implies an understanding of fish as wildlife first and as food second. Wild fish did not come into this world just to be our food. They came into this world to pursue their own individual destinies. If we hunt them and eat them, we must hunt them with care and eat them with the fullness of our appreciation. We must come to understand that eating the last wild food is, above all, a privilege.

  Epilogue

  This summer, for the first time since my childhood, I fished my home waters again—the rocky, quiet bays of western Long Island Sound. I was joined by my daughter, Tanya. As she enters her teenage years, she has emerged as remarkably similar to my mother, in looks if not in character. Blond and slim, she has my mother’s dark, bold eyebrows and easy gait. But where my mother was vague, Tanya is concrete. Where my mother was, in a way, helpless and careless, Tanya is directed and given to problem solving. Also, unlike my mother, who fished with me out of obligation, Tanya genuinely likes fishing. I chalk this up as one of the small victories of influence a father can have over his children once they’ve started down the course toward adulthood.

  We were aboard a party fishing boat called the Angler out of Port Washington, New York, just twenty miles from New York City. The Angler. I couldn’t help but think of Izaak Walton and his book The Compleat Angler, the treatise he penned in 1653, that first parsing of fish for the general public. One where salmon were identified as “kings” and pike called “tyrants.” I wondered what Walton would make of our intended quarry this night—a specifically American fish called the bluefish, which is so ferocious it would make bot
h king and tyrant flee in terror if they were to come across one on a dark night.

  Though the Angler was a party boat, capable of carrying fifty or more passengers, this evening only four of us had shown up. It has been a slow few years for party boats. As children increasingly turn away from fishing and toward more contained and less wild forms of entertainment, the old boats of my youth are dropping away. One captain earlier in the summer had told me he couldn’t even get enough fares to sail on Father’s Day. For a little while, it was debatable whether the captain of the Angler would even make the trip this night—the cost of gas alone would guarantee the voyage to be a money loser. But in the end, perhaps because of my daughter’s enthusiasm or the boat’s newness to the waters (the owners had recently moved from Brooklyn in hopes of pursuing a wider variety of species), the captain decided to sail as a losing proposition.