Tag Archives: ‘King’s Of Their Own Ocean’
In bluefin tuna, fisheries science is never neat
Pinchin’s eponymous kings are Atlantic bluefin tuna, marine predators that can weigh well over a thousand pounds, “imagine a grand piano shaped like a nuclear weapon,” as Pinchin puts it. Bluefin are extraordinary organisms: warm-blooded, keen-eyed, coated in pigment-producing cells that flash a rainbow of colors when the fish are hauled onto a boat. Pinchin excels at evoking her piscine subjects, whose sickle-shaped tails beat nearly as fast as a hummingbird’s wing. “To stand beside a just-landed giant bluefin, still slick from salt water, feels akin to standing beside a natural marvel like Niagara Falls or an erupting volcano,” writes Pinchin, a Nova Scotia-based science journalist. “There’s beauty, but also danger.” Her book isn’t just an ode to bluefin — it’s about humankind’s obsession with them, a fixation as old as our species. >click to read< 16:29
‘King’s Of Their Own Ocean’: A fish tale featuring a tuna named Amelia tells the urgent story of the future of our seas
Starting in the mid-1930s, as a craze for saltwater fishing swept across sporting communities in Canada and the U.S., thousands of tourists flocked to remote Wedgeport, Nova Scotia with the dream of landing a giant Atlantic bluefin tuna on rod and reel. Drawn by the Acadian town’s annual International Tuna Tournament — which started in 1937 and was put on hiatus for the Second World War, those anglers included Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, and Amelia Earhart, who dreamed of, as Ernest Hemingway wrote, entering “unabashed into the presence of the very elder gods. In 1946, the year Wedgeport’s tuna tournament resumed after the war, Margaret Perry, a 41‑year‑old, curly‑haired widow, arrived in Wedgeport lugging a suitcase‑sized 16 mm film camera and her heavy, awkward tripod. >ckick to read< 98:08
