“Bigger Fish to Fry”
Here’s something very different from last week’s post, since I want to try something new this time. I’m going to write a relatively short post about some sort of news that caught my attention and I think is worth sharing. It’s more of a scientific literature review than anything else. But we’ll see how it goes.
The news cycle being what it is, most things that don’t have to do with American politics or video games tend to go under my radar. But, being an environmental science major, I try to keep a special eye out for stories that have to do with the wider wild world. Which is why I’m kind of surprised that I didn’t hear about the fish that sold for three million dollars.
Yes, you read that correctly. Million. With six zeroes. Or more money than I’m statistically likely to see at any single point in my life. What kind of fish is worth that much money? And who’s spending that much on some beady-eyed weirdo? Well, turns out that this man, Kiyoshi Kimura of Japan, was willing to drop the price of several large houses for this fish. And what fish was this? None other than the chicken of the sea. Except this chicken weighed 600 pounds.
The Bluefin Tuna, with this individual fish now known as the most expensive fish ever sold at the Tokyo fish market, isn’t your average, run-of-the-mill canned fish, though. They’re prized for their size, flavor, marbling (whatever that means), and their rarity. It’s said that the Japanese handle their fish better, and that the fish there are better than the US in general, which makes bluefin tuna from Japan especially expensive.
Depending on the season it’s bought in and where it’s coming from, these fish can run from $40 to $400 per pound in the United States. Which, if you ask me, is just ridiculous. These enormous fish are generally caught in small numbers, though they can grow to over 500 pounds in many cases. They’re often prized for sushi, and they’re not the kind of tuna that you’re getting in a can from the supermarket. That’s Light or Albacore.
So, apparently there are a bunch of different species of tuna, ranging from small to massive and from common to endangered. Canned tuna is made from the more common albacore tuna and sometimes yellowfin tuna, but the rarity of bluefin tuna prices them out of the average industrial production line.
There lies part of the problem, though.  Bluefin tuna populations are declining, even though you can still go out and fish them for sport on the east coast. It’s a bit like big game hunting, I guess, but the big game is also a giant fish. The Atlantic bluefin tuna is the most endangered, despite the fact that the pacific populations of the bluefin tuna were severely overfished. Much like some other fish you might have heard of.
Catching fish en masse is a weird endeavor, from what I’ve learned. It either involves the new-fangled technology of trawling and seine nets, where you literally drag massive nets behind a boat in order to scoop up fish. Or, there’s the other alternative, which is a modern spin on an old favorite. Long line fishing is just regular rod and reel fishing, except the line is miles long and has dozens of hooks on it. That’s typically how bluefin tuna are caught.
There are a ton of environmental issues that come with these industrial fishing fleets, including the incredibly high mortality rates of unintended catch, otherwise known as bycatch, that include everything from other fish to dolphins. Usually bycatch is thrown back, but depending on how thorough the vetting process is for any given region, your tin of tuna may have some uninvited guests for dinner.
Anyway, I don’t really have much else to say. I just wanted to point out that someone bought this big-ass fish for more than three hundred million yen, or three million dollars. I don’t personally eat fish, so I don’t really get the appeal of it, but the guy said that fish seemed fresh, so more power to him, I suppose? If your business has the kind of money that you can make really fancy tuna, then I guess you’re gonna spend it somehow.
On the other end of the spectrum, though, for fish that you don’t want to eat, I’d also like to point out that the most expensive pet fish is the platinum Arowana, which general sells for $400,000 or more. What I really want to know is who has the money to buy what amounts to an astronomically expensive wall ornament. But illegally fishing is a huge issue, actually, both for things like protected tuna and tropical fish. And that’s one of the big problems with industrial fishing.
There are plenty of laws that are supposed to protect certain species of fish or populations of fishes, but they’re incredibly difficult to enforce, especially when most people seem to treat oceans as lawless frontiers. And because these laws are so hard to enforce and the profit margin for getting the right fish is so huge, there’s a ton of shady, underhanded methods that different groups will use to get the best fish.
That’s how you get people like the Codfather, a man who was arrested for lying about his catches and basically sank the entire industry of his town when he was removed. And it’s part of what makes the exotic animal trade so unruly, because people will pay top dollar for these illegal fish.
It makes me wonder what kind of forces are at play behind the scenes in your everyday fish market. What kind of surprises, both good and bad, exist in between all those scales? There’s the classic story of the Coelacanth, a believed-extinct species that was rediscovered at a Indonesia fish market. I wonder what kind of life the people who buy bluefin tuna live, too. Like Kiyoshi Kimura, the Tuna King, who apparently wanted to be a pilot when he was kid. Now he buys tuna for three million dollars. That kind of story could be a whole biopic, if you ask me. I’d watch it.
If you want to learn more about how industrial fishing works, or the problems with it, there are plenty of different sources. For example, if you want to know how the fish you buy at the supermarket may not be what it says on the label, take a look at this. But at least when you pay three millions dollars for a tuna you know exactly what you’re getting.
