Bluefin Blues

The closest I've ever been to a live bluefin was at a tuna fattening farm in southern Japan. I stood on the wobbling catwalk while someone shovelled frozen fish into the pen. The sight of a six-foot silver swimming machine emerging from the bottom of the cage, turning on its side and inhaling a dead mackerel is unsettling.

But it should be no surprise that these farms exist. Many tuna stocks are in trouble, and a new report on Mediterranean bluefin suggests they could easily be destroyed.

If you're interested in the rapid development of this kind of aquaculture, where fish are caught at sea, fattened in cages and then sold, there's a new UN-produced report that includes tuna.

But, as I write in The End of the River, fattening farms will eventually be replaced by full-on, egg to adult tuna culture. Researchers from several countries are going flat out to solve problems of broodstock collection, how to get eggs and sperm out of the fish, how to incubate the fertilized eggs, feed the larvae, keep them going round and round, disease-free, until they're big enough to eat. All big challenges, but I expect they'll all be overcome.

I took the photo in Tokyo's Tsukiji market, where frozen tuna are laid out for inspection before they're auctioned off.

Lecture and Launch at the Vancouver Aquarium

I'm very fortunate to be able to talk about The End of the River in mid-November at the Vancouver Aquarium, a wonderful institution where I have lots of friends and colleagues. I've chosen the provocative title "How Not To Save Global Fisheries" because I think the so-called "experts" like me often think they have the answers - but in my case, it turned out that the more I learned, the less I was certain of!

I'm especially excited about being able to show some of the wonderful photos of Brazil's São Francisco River, which flows through my book. They were taken by the young Brazilian photographer João Zinclar, who also took the shot used on the front cover. A gifted guy.

Will that be farmed or wild?

I know a guy in Vancouver who is an experienced Japanese chef. He's also an auto mechanic, which strikes me as a an admirable hedging of bets, especially in today's economy: even if people stop buying sushi, they still need their brakes fixed.

I asked this very knowledgeable guy about preparing fish in a sushi restaurant, and he told me, "If we get it in the round (whole fish), the guts are a dead giveaway. Yellowtail especially, the guts are wrapped in fat. Even without tasting it, I know it's farmed."

Now, I doubt I could tell the difference between farmed and wild yellowtail by taste alone, but I do know that your chances of finding wild yellowtail on the sushi menu are slim. I took the picture of the guy shopping (above) in Tokyo last fall, and I made notes on the labels in the display case: the yellowtail was all farmed.

In The End of the River, I talk about the proliferation of fish farming in Japan, but it's really a global phenomenon. Here's a startling number: half of the fish consumed worldwide now comes from a farm. If you want to go farther into this subject, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) now tells us that, in the next decades, fish farmers are going to have trouble keeping up with demand.

As I said in an earlier post, statistics can be awfully interesting.

Aliens in Our Backyard

Canada doesn’t have any Brazilian fire ants, which is fine with me. Given a chance, fire ants will swarm a newborn calf before it gets a chance to stand; they go for the eyes. In the warmer parts of the United States, fire ants have been doing just fine ever since the 1930s when somebody – either unwittingly or with a terrible sense of humour – introduced them. In their native country they’re held pretty much in check by other species, but in the US they’re aggressive and highly successful, an import nobody wants.

I was introduced to fire ants in a stifling field station in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, by a wispy American graduate student who spent the last three years hiking into the Pantanal scrub and observing the creature in its rightful place. He seemed credible enough, and I tend to believe people who are prepared to spend six months of the year hunkered down in alligator country in forty-degree heat.

The next day, I went on a field trip of my own, to the place on the Miranda River where, a few weeks earlier, two tucunaré had been caught.

What’s the connection? Well, tucunaré (too-coo-na-RAY) is a fish – a sizable and attractive one – and like the fire ant it’s emigrated to places where it has no business. It belongs in the Amazon basin, not the Parana, and although the sport fishermen love it, tucunaré outcompetes the local species. This particular pair (and let’s face it, if two were caught it means there are thousands in the river now) escaped from a fish farm upriver; the rains came, the dike broke, and off they went, kids in a candy store.

Brazil is the perfect place to contemplate escapes and colonizations. The slavers who brought Africans from Dahomey were themselves transplants from Portugal; Germans and Italians populated the south, and a wave of Japanese immigrants began in 1908. The local indigenous people, of course, didn’t stand a chance. But out of this genetic cauldron, a couple of hundred years later, has come a society with some of the most beautiful people on Earth, and it’s a remarkably tolerant one.

So perhaps, at least for Brazil, colonization and assimilation have been good things. But fish and fire ants are like people: if there aren’t any barriers to reproduction, they’ll jump in and assimilate their brains out. You can build all the containers you like, but everything that lives – people and plants and animals and fish – will eventually find ways to jump out. Dikes break, nets tear, seeds stick to tourists’ socks, cockroaches crawl out of suitcases and the world’s shipping lines distribute whole aquaria of marine stowaways in their ballast tanks.

So, is mixing bad? Should we try and stop it? Can we? These are tough questions, especially for me, a biologist who has spent his career trying to preserve the genetic diversity of fish. When you run a dip net through a little two-bit lagoon in the Pantanal, as I did recently, and come up with a dozen different species of fish that any hobbyist would die for, emotions take over and it’s hard to condone the loss of even a single species.

A visit to a place like Brazil can be subversive. The whole world is genetically leaky, but maybe it’s just more obvious here. If escapes and colonization are inevitable, what does that mean for conservation? Should we just lie back and enjoy it? For me, the answer is still an emotional one, with the huge caveat that, maybe, diversity doesn’t have always to be static. The face of life in Brazil changed forever when the Europeans and the Africans and the Asians came, and the fire ants and the tucunaré and the farmed Atlantic salmon in the photo above and thousands of others like them are going to keep escaping. I don’t much like it, but you have to be realistic about how much you can change it. Maybe that’s just evolution.


A version of this article was originally published in Waters Magazine
Photo of Atlantic salmon on a farm in British Columbia by Monica MacIsaac

Aren't Statistics Wonderful?

In The End of the River, I write a lot about water use - and water shortages. There's a great website called WORLDMAPPER that creates global maps where the actual boundaries of each country are distorted to represent some particular statistic. Look at the one for "water resources" - and the winner appears to be Brazil.

But most of that water in Brazil comes from one place - the Amazon. Other parts of Brazil are parched. For another twist, go to the map for "water use" to find out who uses the most water. It's an interesting comparison!

Victoria Launch for End of the River

We're pushing End of the River out into the real world with a launch in my home town, Victoria. It'll be held at Bean Around the World Coffee, 533 Fisgard Street October 28 between 7 and 9 PM.

"The Bean" has always been the place where I've retreated with a manuscript or other thorny problem; Mike and Maureen, the owners, are very kindly donating the space for our event.

Book sales, Brazilian music, maybe even a reading or two. Everyone is welcome!