In Chapter 45 (“The Affidavit”) of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” Ishmael notes the need to share some preliminary information “in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds.” This is before telling the story of Captain Ahab single-mindedly seeking out that white whale. Could a man really meet the same whale twice? Ishmael affirms that he knows of at least three instances in which a whale was harpooned, escaped, and then, after a period, “in one instance of three years,” the same whale and whaler met again. That Ahab will reëncounter the white whale (on whom he seeks revenge, for having torn off his leg) seems psychologically credible, of course, in the world of fiction. But to believe it would happen in the ocean we know from real life requires a wild insight that at first feels fantastical: that the ocean, and its creatures, are finite.
In “Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas,” Karen Pinchin tells the story of a smaller, but not that small, fish: bluefin tuna and its human pursuers. Though her telling travels centuries, it focusses on one tuna fisherman, Al Anderson, and one tuna, Amelia, who was caught three times, the first time by Anderson in the waters off Narragansett, Rhode Island, when she was young, weighing some ten pounds, in 2004. Anderson, we learn, obsessively tagged bluefin tuna—caught them, marked them, and then released them—for decades, and he led fishing trips for tourists who wanted to do the same. He was a kind of anti-Ahab, seeking not revenge, or even salvation, but to assume, as he described it, the “logical” role of steward “of the resource(s)” on which his and his fellow-fishermen’s livelihoods depended. Although a number of Anderson’s tagged fish turned up a second time, Amelia was caught all the way over in the Mediterranean, and became part of a discussion of how having separate fishing regulations for different parts of the ocean wasn’t a sensible or reasonable plan—the fish crossed boundaries they had been thought to obey. Pinchin’s narrative follows Amelia and her kind as they become part of a knowledge set tied to scientific arguments, innovative sushi dishes, vicious disputes, fisticuffs, and, now and again, some crimes.
As best as we know, the world’s oldest highly coördinated fishing industry is the bluefin-tuna hunt in the Mediterranean. An early coin shows a Greek temple with columns made from bluefin; a coin from Macedonia depicts a tuna beneath a lion who is attacking a bull. The bluefin was sacrificed to Poseidon, and worshipped in a more domestic fashion: it was preserved by salting, and its guts were fermented into a nutritionally and financially valuable sauce. Pliny the Elder wrote that children were fed tuna liver to help them grow.
But, long before all our technologies of mass consumption and processing, the fate of the tuna was less than steady. In 1376, a group of British fishermen complained that a new piece of equipment, the “wondryechaun”—with destructive heavy wood beams and stones that dragged a large net across the floor of the sea—was ruining the fish harvest. The government eventually intervened, banning destructive dragging devices. In 1757, a Benedictine monk who lived at a major fishery in Sicily wrote, “In past centuries the tunas caught in the traps were almost infinite”—then, in a span of twenty years, the tuna harvests had gone from highs near sixty thousand fish a year to closer to five thousand. A credible theory is that the decline during that time period wasn’t from overfishing but from a change in water temperature, owing to the Little Ice Age.
Bluefin like Amelia, however storied among fishermen, are less familiar to most of us than whales or sharks or orcas or even guppies, but they are, it turns out, magnificent. Their bodies are made mostly of muscle. They swim in a “thunniform” fashion, with little to no head or body movement, relying instead on the powerful swishing of a jointed tail and on what seems to be the drag-reducing powers of yellow spiked finlets on the back and belly. To me, this way of moving gives them a stoic, no-nonsense look. In groups, they sometimes swim in military formation: side by side in a single, horizontal row. At other times, they form a wheel shape or, close to the surface, a dome.
And they grow to be big—often to hundreds of pounds, sometimes more than a thousand. Their skin can be muted and unremarkable, but then flash and shimmer through blues, purples, and oranges. It does this especially when they fight, and Pinchin writes of Anderson that he “sometimes found himself flabbergasted by the fish’s beauty as its skin morphed before his eyes, turning spotted, or variegated, or even striped dark and light like a zebra’s coat.” Tuna fishermen often have special chairs on their boats for the wrangling part of catching a tuna, and the hauling up doesn’t always go well, with occasional broken ribs or cut hands. These wounds seem somehow dignified once you start to know tuna so well that you imagine their journeys across oceans.
In the nineteen-sixties, when Al Anderson was a young man fishing for striped bass on the Atlantic coast, bluefin tuna were a nuisance, if an impressive one. They swam fast and broke his lines. Scientists had only recently come to understand that the fish were warm-blooded. Bluefin were considered fun sport fish, but the flesh sold for about five cents a pound, less than trout. Often the ginormous fish in photographs from tournaments were buried, if they couldn’t be sold or frozen fast enough; driving them in the ice-filled trunk of a car might not earn back the price of the fuel. The pale meat of albacore tuna was preferred to that of bluefin, the latter of which was seen, Pinchin writes, as “a poverty fish, good only for cats and Italian immigrants who could be convinced to buy it canned and cheap by the box.”
The supply seemed inexhaustible. Attempts to understand and manage fishing began to pop up, such as the founding, in 1940, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the appointment, in 1948, of the very first Under-Secretary of State for Fisheries. But, as one assistant director for the Fish and Wildlife Service observed in 1950, a fisheries manager worked with a “vast, unorganized ignorance, illuminated by occasional flashes of traditional legend, hearsay, inference, assumption, guesswork.”
Then something happened very far from the Atlantic waters frequented by Anderson and others. Bluefin had become a treasured sushi fish in Japan. In the nineteen-seventies, however, the bluefin populations in the Pacific plummeted. Japanese fishermen looked farther afield, and they needed to find ways to freeze and transport the prized fish. After a few false starts (including a time when fish from Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, were transported in coffins filled with ice to J.F.K. Airport before being loaded onto cargo flights), the technical problems of maintaining the fish in top condition were solved—inviting a whole new set of problems.
The price of Atlantic bluefin tuna quickly went up tenfold in North America. It was then sold in Japan for even more, and those were only the early days. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT, kept setting bluefin-fishing limits at levels that now seemed to scientists and activists to be recklessly high. Fishermen agreed that the population was falling, but what good would it do them to leave behind a fish someone else would haul in instead? “The best guys around here are lucky to get eight or nine giants a year,” one fisherman told the Times, in 1991. “We used to get seven or eight a day.”
Until fish were extensively tagged, their movements were, for the most part, cloaked. The rise of tagging gave scientists and activists data with which to make their arguments to governing agencies—not that there was easy agreement. Pinchin details the role played by Frank Mather, a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who started the Cooperative Game Fish Tagging Program, a sort of predecessor of the citizen-science projects we see today, in which ordinary people are able to share their data or labor, in a way that I like to think of as akin to the accident and police-car reports that drivers make on Waze. That sort of work eventually led Anderson to make a niche for himself as a captain with whom tourists paid to go out tagging; they would take home only enough fish to eat with friends that night.
As early as the age of eleven, Anderson, who grew up in a poor household in central New Jersey, used to go fishing and bring home dinner to his extended family. His mother struggled with mental illness, but sometimes she’d take him fishing after school. Anderson, while still a young man, fashioned his own version of a tag to use at a local lake so that he could have a sense—by observing whether the same fish turned up on his hook again—of how many fish were out there.
By 2007, studies documented a collapsing bluefin population, and in 2008 the scientific arm of the ICCAT recommended that the allowable catch for bluefin be set at ten thousand metric tons. The ICCAT set it at thirty-two thousand metric tons. Almost an equal amount of illegal fishing could be expected, leading to a total that some estimated to be about a third of all the tuna to be found in the entire Atlantic.
Bluefin tuna are apex predators, at least if you leave humans out of the system. As we know from wolves and from sharks, apex predators are often keystone species. A tuna consumes eight to ten per cent of its weight in other species every day. “Without bluefin tuna, a phenomenon dubbed ‘trophic cascade’ would occur,” Pinchin writes. She cites a 2012 modelling simulation that saw the numbers of bluefin affecting the health of “swordfish, mackerel, Norway lobster, and bonito tuna”; damage to those populations affects the even smaller creatures such as “herring, squid . . . and phytoplankton,” and finally back to the true apex predator (humans), in increasing the likelihood of damage to coastal communities, which are already threatened owing to erosion, storm surges, and flooding.
In some sense, Pinchin’s book tells a story you might intuit: a species valuable both commercially and ecologically has been fished too much. The network of people and institutions meant to safeguard the fish, and the fishermen, and keep everything “in balance” are a jumble of well-meaning, corrupted by profit motive, corrupted by egotism, and plain unwieldy—all dwarfed, anyhow, by the broader forces of climate change.
Naturally, the book also asks where we should go from here. In an interview with Rafael Márquez Guzmán, the head of a major fishery in the south of Spain, near where the tagged Amelia turns up for the third time, Pinchin shows how some of the fishermen themselves became part of a push for more sustainable fish-catch numbers. “The fishery was in danger and we knew it. . . . We were absolutely sure that our jobs would disappear along with the bluefin tuna,” Guzmán said, in 2022. Shortly after the ICCAT set the allowable catch at thirty-two thousand metric tons, the organization changed course, and began the first of several recovery plans. The catch was reduced to thirteen thousand five hundred metric tons. The efforts appear, at least anecdotally, to have worked.
Anderson died in 2018, a year before Pinchin started to research and report her book. You can see how close she comes to this man of the sea whom she never met, as she learns, from his widow and from his own writings, about his repairing old fishing rods in his uncle’s basement, his growing confidence as a ship captain, his brain tumor and recovery, his alcoholism and recovery—and his eventual devotion to tagging and learning about and teaching about bluefin tuna. Most people in the book are referred to by last name, but Pinchin calls Anderson, simply, Al.
The story of the bluefin, and of us, remains unfinished. “God keep me from ever completing anything,” Ishmael writes, at the end of “Cetology,” the thirty-second chapter of what is arguably our most American novel. He is referring to the system of classification that he has written up (often with wit) for all the whales of the world, but suggests that any great project cannot be finished by those who started it, and declares his whole book to be but the draft of a draft, and then ends the chapter, somewhat mysteriously, “Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”—and that would seem to be about where the tuna story stands today. 
The Magnificence of the Bluefin Tuna
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