Friday Fishy News - December 1

[Flattieman]

Quite the lure: a $1 million fish

By Susan Cocking

Miami Herald - USA

November 29

Somewhere along the coastal waters of South Florida roams a sailfish worth $1 million.

Almost anyone is eligible to collect the cash prize for recapturing the tagged fish, but first they have to register for one of Tony Albelo's two upcoming billfish tournaments -- the Sailfish Kickoff, Dec. 7-10, or the Mayor's Cup, Jan. 25-28 -- both out of Monty's Marina in Coconut Grove.

Whoever might be lucky enough to catch the fish must clip off the numeric tag, release the fish unharmed and present the tag to tournament officials for verification. Everyone on board will be required to submit to a polygraph test.

''We want people to know it's a legitimate shot at $1 million,'' Albelo said.

``Personally, I hope somebody wins it, because, for me, it's just more hype for the tournament.''

Winning all that cash certainly would change someone's life, but not as much as you might think.

Captain Dean Panos will guide three charter customers in the Sailfish Kickoff aboard his 34-foot light-tackle boat, Double D. He said the odds of recapturing the $1 million fish are rather slim. Still, if they were to do it, ''I'd probably buy a bigger boat,'' Panos said. ``And I wouldn't have to work six or seven days a week, but I think I'd still charter.''

Panos and his teammates have agreed to split their winnings, with 33 percent going to the charter customers.

Captain Matt Tambor, who skippers the private boat Owl's Nest for owner Jeffrey Altman, said he, too, probably would maintain his career.

''I'd have to give back to the fishing industry,'' Tambor said. ``And some of it would go into real estate.''

LAST SEEN

For the record, the sailfish that could be worth $1 million was caught, tagged and released Tuesday afternoon by Miami charter boat captain Rick Thomas in about 120 feet of water off Government Cut. It ate the farthest live goggle eye dangling from a kite line aboard a 58-foot Riviera #####ing yacht skippered by Robert Lizano of Florida Yachts International.

Albelo and the crew of the Riviera recruited Thomas and his brother Jimbo, owner/operators of the Bayside Marina-based charter boat Thomas Flyer, after failing to locate sailfish all morning long. They bought a dozen goggle eyes, or big-eye scad, from captain Jimmy Lewis on the Kite Hunter and added some threadfin herring they caught on Sabiki rigs in Government Cut.

About 15 minutes after putting out two kites with three baits each, plus a flat line, Rick Thomas calmly pointed out ''a boil on the right long'' kite line about 75 yards off the stern.

As yelling erupted in the cockpit, Thomas calmly began reeling tight on the disappearing line -- careful not to try to set the hook because circle hooks were being used.

Within seconds, a sailfish burst up through the surface -- causing even greater consternation on board.

Lizano kept the boat moving slowly forward as Thomas gained line. After a few moments, he brought the fish to the surface, which was tail-wrapped in the fishing line.

''Grab his tail and get the tag where we want it,'' Thomas directed his crewmates.

Jimbo held the fishing line steady while first mate Ozzie Gonzalez inserted the tag in the fatty tissue behind the sail's dorsal. The crew kept the fish moving forward to ensure water would pass through its gills. Then they cut the line close to the hook when the sail was ready to swim away.

How did it feel to catch a $1 million fish, someone asked Rick.

''I'll let you know in a couple of weeks,'' he chuckled.

To keep the contest free from tampering, Albelo had previously taken a close-up digital photograph of the tag. He sealed the camera's memory card in an envelope and gave it to an outside observer who is not registered for the tournament for safekeeping. The prize money, he said, is guaranteed by an insurance policy.

CHANCES ARE SLIM?

Albelo and others believe the chances of recapturing the tagged fish are about equal to hitting the lottery.

Fisheries scientists say tag returns on billfish run around 3 percent -- not a great rate. But captain Ray Rosher, owner of the Miss Britt charter boats and skipper of Kitt Toomey's private tournament yacht, Get Lit, knows from first-hand experience about the chances of catching that proverbial needle in a haystack.

''In the Miami Billfish Tournament last year, I tagged a fish off Haulover on the Get Lit,'' Rosher said. ``That was in April. Six weeks later, I was the captain of the Miss Britt on a charter and I caught my own fish off Triumph [Reef]. That fish only moved 20 miles in six weeks. This is not just a pipe dream; this is something that can actually happen.''

Bolstering Rosher's contention is the memory of a 2005 incident that overcame incredible odds.

Eric Bartos caught a sailfish during a Miami Beach Rod & Reel Club tournament off Miami that bore a wedding ring around its bill -- the same wedding ring Bartos himself had placed there more than two years previously off Fort Lauderdale while going through a difficult divorce. Bartos passed a polygraph administered following the catch.

And sailfish numbers seem to be steadily increasing in South Florida. Last year's Sailfish Kickoff yielded 550 releases among 65 teams in two days -- an average of one release every 1 minute, 10 seconds.

Many of the most accomplished offshore fishing teams in the area are expected to compete next week -- especially with the additional financial incentive.

Said Rosher: ``You are going to have a lot of boats out fishing for it.''

Fish who take bait not stupid, just hungry and aggressive

By Mark Henderson

The London Times - UK

December 1

Fish are not the brainless dolts they are often assumed to be. Scientists have discovered that they are actually adept learners, with distinct personalities that change as they pick up information about the world.

The popular notion that fish memories are measured in seconds has been exposed as a myth by research which showed that rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) remember experiences so well that they alter their behaviour in line with what they learn.

The study, led by Lynne Sneddon of the University of Liverpool, found that individual trout display very different characters — some are bold and inquisitive; others are shy and passive.

These traits, however, can change rapidly in response to particular experiences, as the fish learn how best to cope with their environment — and these changes might influence how likely they are to find themselves on the end of a hook.

Bolder fish are much more likely to approach and eat unfamiliar forms of prey and tend to eat more to compensate for their higher levels of physical activity, which may make them more vulnerable to anglers.

Shy trout, by contrast, will leave strange-looking food well alone, perhaps protecting themselves from the risk of being caught.

The discovery that trout behaviour changes in response to experience shows clearly that the fish are not stupid, but rather that they are good at learning.

"That is a bit of a myth, the idea that fish remember only for seconds," Dr Sneddon said. "Studies have shown that fish can rememeber for anything up to three years, and current thinking in fish biology is that fish are very diverse in behaviour within any population.

"Rainbow trout certainly have contrasting personalities. Some are bold and some are shy. The bold fish take risks, they are quick to learn, more aggressive and active. Shy fish are cautious and timid, and spend more time under cover.

"They also learn from their experiences: they adjust their behaviour according to what they pick up from others."

In the study, which is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, Sneddon’s team first watched rainbow trout as they were exposed to new and unfamiliar stimuli in the form of shapes made of Lego dropped into their tanks.

Fish were then categorized as bold or shy, depending on how quickly they investigated the objects and how closely they approached them.

The researchers then conducted two experiments on each group.

In the first, shy and bold fish were placed in a tank for about 15 minutes a day with another fish that was either much larger or much smaller.

As trout are aggressive and territorial, this was designed to provoke a fight in which the size difference between the fish would decide the winner.

When retested with unfamiliar food or objects, shy fish that had repeatedly won such fights grew much bolder, whereas bold fish that had repeatedly lost territorial fights to larger fish became more cautious.

Victorious bold fish remained bold, but shy fish that lost also grew more adventurous. Dr Sneddon said that this was probably the result of a "Desperado effect."

Submissive fish learn that the only way to feed is to take more risks.

"Subordinate fishes are known to obtain food by waiting until the dominant is engaged in aggression," she said.

In the second experiment, shy and bold fish were given the opportunity to observe a fish of the opposite personality type as unfamiliar food was dropped into a tank divided by a one-way mirror.

The "observer" fish could thus see how the "demonstrator" fish reacted, but the latter was unaware of the presence of the former.

When bold fish watched shy fish, they became more reserved. The shy fish, however, stayed shy after watching bold ones.

Sneddon said that it was possible that the fish thought themselves unable to compete with dominant individuals and thus refused to ape their behaviour.

Boffins use noodles on fishy riddle

By Paul Jackson

NEWS.com.au

November 26

TERRITORY marine scientists have stumbled across a rare fish that they can't class in a family species.

The fish, dubbed the "noodle fish", was found on one of the world's largest uninhabited islands, in the South Pacific.

It was brought to Darwin by David Boseto, a graduate assistant in science at the University of the South Pacific who is visiting Darwin on a three-week training course.

Mr Boseto brought fish specimens from Fiji and the Solomon Islands with him, including the noodle fish, which was found during a survey of rivers on Tetepare Island in the western Solomons.

"While training David to identify the fish found in the survey we came across a small gobioid fish that so far defies accurate identification," NT Museum and Art Gallery curator of fishes Dr Helen Larson told the Sunday Territorian.

"Dubbed by scientists as the noodle fish, it is different from any other gobioid fish I have ever seen, and we are struggling to put it in a family.

"Because it is a single specimen, we can't use destructive techniques like clearing and staining, which makes the fish much harder to study.

"We will have to collect another specimen before it can be described."

Gobioid fish belong to one of the largest families of fish in the world, with more than 2000 species.

Most are relatively small, typically less than 10cm long.

Several species of the gobioids are also popular as aquarium fish.

The fish are of great significance as prey species for commercially important fish like cod, haddock, sea bass and flatfish.

The fish are primarily found in shallow marine habitats including tide pools, coral reefs and seagrass meadows.

They are also common in brackish water and estuarine habitats including the lower reaches of rivers, mangrove swamps and salt marshes.

Army ordered to transport fish

Fishupdate.com

28 November

AN army base near the East Yorkshire Coast has been given its strangest task yet - to transport over 900 lbs of fish.

The Defence School of Transport is based at RAF Leconfield, home to the air sea rescue helicopter squadrons which frequently fly to the aid of trawlers and fishermen in trouble in the North Sea.

But the base has a its own large fish stocks - in a large pond in the grounds of the School of Transport which contain thousands of freshwater Rudd.

Next week the fish will be carefully taken out of the pond and loaded into tanks and then placed on the Army lorries before being removed from the base.

Some will be carefully transported more than 50 miles to a lake at Cottingley, near Bradford while the remainder will be put into the Beverley Canal, near Hull - presumably for the benefit of local anglers.

The move is partly to de-stock the pond at RAF Leconfield so more fish can breed, but there is also an environmental nature side to the exercise. It is to help halt the decline of the great crested newt, which live in the pond on the base.

Environment Agency fisheries officer Peter Turner said: "The great crested newt will get the chance to thrive on land at the barracks, and anglers in Bradford and Beverley will also benefit from the boost to their local fish stocks."

Annual fish census begins tomorrow [today]

NEWS.com.au

November 30

VICTORIAN scuba divers are preparing to explore the state's kelp forests, seagrass meadows and sponge gardens as part of the Great Victorian Fish Count.

The annual census of reef fish, which begins tomorrow and runs until December 17, is being coordinated by Reef Watch Victoria, a program that encourages divers to monitor and care for marine life at their favourite dive sites.

The initiative is funded by the Federal Government's Natural Heritage Trust.

Reef Watch coordinator Wendy Roberts said the state's coastal waters were home to more than 700 species of fish.

"More than 80 per cent of fish species living in Australia's southern waters are found nowhere else on earth," Ms Roberts said.

"Many of these fish species are weird, wonderful and as uniquely Australian as the Kangaroo".

Ms Roberts said that organisers had received a lot of interest from scuba divers who wanted to take part in the fish census.

"More and more scuba divers are taking a real interest in fish-watching", Ms Roberts said.

"It's great because their efforts are highlighting the significance of Victoria's reef fish populations, the need for conservation efforts and providing valuable insights into a world very few of us explore."

More than 17 areas will be surveyed as part of the count, including sites in eastern Victoria, the central coastal region and western Victoria.

EU Sets Rules to Save Deep Water Fish Stocks

Factory trawling is under closer scrutiny

By Bernd Riegert

Deutsche Welle - Germany

November 25

EU fisheries ministers agreed on a set of measures to slow overfishing in European waters. But the planned changes fall far short of demands by ecologists and marine biologists.

Following tough negotiations, agriculture and fisheries ministers from the European Union agreed to reduce catches of fish below a depth of 400 meters (about 400 yards).

Depending on the type of fish, the catch should be reduced by 10 to 25 percent, according to the terms of a deal struck this week. But that differs significantly from the demands of marine biologists, who have called for an immediate end to deep-sea fishing of overexploited or fully exploited fish stocks.

"In recent years, fishing in deep waters has increased as traditional stocks, such as cod, have declined," the International Council for Exploration of the Sea said on its Web site. "The stocks of many deep-sea fish are in decline and can only sustain very limited fishing pressure. In light of these concerns, (we) suggest an immediate reduction of fishing pressure on fully exploited or overexploited deep-sea stocks."

Spain blocks action

Fresh-caught herring from the coast of Germany

EU ministers only agreed to stop catching certain fish -- for instance, deep-sea sharks -- and the decision only applies to fishing in EU waters.

In New York the United Nations is currently debating a world-wide reduction in ecologically damaging deep-sea factory fishing and trawling. However, EU member Spain is working to block an effective ban.

Joe Borg, EU Commissioner for Fisheries and Maritime Affairs, warned that the interests of the fishing industry also have to be taken into account.

"The difficulty lies in finding a solution that will take pressure off of fish levels, but won't send the fishing companies into financial ruin," Borg said. "It wasn't easy, but I think we found the balance."

"Like clear-cutting a forest"

After shelf waters became severely over-fished in the early 1990s, many fisheries moved operations out to deep water, environmentalists complain; they say repeated fishing by factory trawlers destroyed entire ecosystems.

Life may have become safer for some sharks.

"It can be compared to clear-cutting an entire forest," said environmental protection group Greenpeace.

The EU ministers agreed to better protect threatened fish stocks in the Mediterranean starting in 2008. Fishing nets should have bigger holes, and fishing should not take place in breeding grounds near the coast.

But the World Wildlife Fund has said the EU is merely trying to reintroduce dragnet trawling -- which has been forbidden since 2002 -- through the back door.

Using technology

Participants in the talks agreed that new technology should be used to damp illegal fishing. All trawlers in the EU should be outfitted with electronic logbooks that would register the exact amounts of fish they catch. With help from satellites, authorities should be able to keep track of the fish and their spawning grounds, as well as the trawlers' fishing routes.

But environmentalists complain that these measures are too little and too slow. According to a study in the US magazine Science, sea life could be eradicated by 2048 if serious protective measures for the ecosystem, including fishing quotas, aren't taken soon.

Piranha among 13 new species of Venezuelan fish

Reuters News

November 30

OSLO - Scientists have found a new type of piranha and a ray among 13 new species of freshwater fish in an area of Venezuela where pollution from gold mines is emerging as a threat, a conservationist said on Thursday.

"There was a very high diversity of life," said Leeanne Alonso, a director of Washington-based Conservation International, of a three-week survey of wildlife at the confluence of the Orinoco and Ventuari rivers.

Among 13 species of fish believed to be new to science were a ray, a miniature catfish and a type of meat-eating piranha. The scientists also found a small type of shrimp, also previously undocumented.

"The region is still very pristine but we want to ensure protection before its too late," Alonso told Reuters. Conservation International is a non-profit group seeking to protect the diversity of life on the planet.

"The main threat is the illegal gold mining," she said.

Gold mining uses polluting mercury to help flush out gold, and some fish studied had higher than normal amounts of mercury in their flesh.

Alonso said many men from local villages had gone to work in mining gold. "There's more potential for them to be doing ecotourism for fishing, or wildlife viewing," she said. Some of the fish could be used for the aquarium trade.

During the trip, scientists from Conservation International, Fundacion La Salle and Fundacion Cisneros documented a total of 357 plant species, 157 bird species and 245 fish species, including the new ones.

The region also includes a well-known river resort -- both former U.S. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush have visited the area for fishing.

Regional action sought on fish stocks

From correspondents in Jakarta

NEWS.com.au

November 29

INDONESIA and Australia are seeking to forge regional cooperation to tackle the problem of rapidly dwindling fish stocks due to overfishing and poaching, officials said today.

Senior officials from 13 countries including China and Japan attended the opening of a meeting in Jakarta to prepare for next year's regional conference to promote responsible fishing practices co-hosted by Indonesia and Australia.

“We have to conserve our fishery resources not only for this generation but for the generations to come,” Indonesian Marine Affairs and Fisheries Minister Freddy Numberi said at the opening of the meeting.

He cited various studies which have warned that the world's fish stocks would be depleted by the middle of the century if no measures were taken and added that illegal fishing was mainly to blame for the unsustainable fishing.

“Much of the illegal fishing is done by international crime syndicates, and not by traditional fishermen,” Mr Numberi said.

Australian ambassador Bill Farmer said regional cooperation was needed to tackle the problem of dwindling fish stocks.

“We do face a common issue, the depletion of fishery stocks... many of us have concerns over the future of fisheries,” Mr Farmer said in his opening speech.

Mr Farmer said the meeting and the conference next year would talks about ways to promote sustainable, responsible fishing in the region and added that “joint action is the best way for us to address this problem.”

“We have to address unsustainable (fishing) practices, we have to address illegal practices,” he said, adding that he hoped regional cooperation would produce “practicable, workable solutions over time”.

The conference is due to address priority areas, including assessment of fish stocks and the scope of over-fishing and illegal fishing in the region as well as finding best practices to reduce them.

The two-day meeting this week will assess priority areas for capacity building and the development of a regional monitoring, control and surveillance network.

Some 45 officials from Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, East Timor and Vietnam and several observer groups are taking part in the meeting.

The Next Big Fish

Chilean sea bass was the first celebrity fish - until we nearly ate it all. How far do we have to go to find its successor? Just near the Berkshires, actually.

By Charles Pierce

Boston Globe - USA

November 26

This is a story of two fish.

It is an old tale of the price of fame. It is both comedy and tragedy. It begins with a South American dictator. It's a story of plucky fishermen pushed out to sea and into peril. It even has pirates. But, mostly, it is the story of one fish that spent hundreds of placid centuries inoffensively cruising the deepest, coldest waters of the southern sea, down where the great primal engine of the Humboldt Current drives the waters of Antarctica into the southern Pacific, a fish that became so popular that it was sold into virtual extinction. Once upon a time, there was a fish that died of marketing.

More than 30 years ago, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, in a frenzy of deregulation, threw open his country's territorial waters to foreign factory fishing, which not only decimated the local supplies of cod and hake – the fatty, versatile whitefish that are the staples of seafood restaurants everywhere – but also sent Chilean fishermen into deeper and more dangerous waters. Soon, from depths that exceeded 5,000 feet, they began hauling up the Patagonian toothfish, an enormous, hideous creature that had evolved in ways that made it a nearly perfect replacement for the species that had been devastated by factory fishing. For example, because it lacked a swim bladder, the fish had developed a method of using fats secreted directly into its tissues as a means of flotation. Its body was almost all white flesh. The fish was nearly pure foodstuff. All it needed was a spiffy nom de cuisine. Nobody ever would have taken a bite out of something called the Patagonian toothfish. And thus, in 1977, was born the product known as Chilean sea bass.

“It was just this sort of junk fish that they brought up from the depths,” explains Lydia Bergen, the manager of the Sustainable Fisheries Initiative at the New England Aquarium. “The white flesh is really appealing to the US palate. It's not very fishy flavored, but it's oily, so there's almost no way you can overcook it.” Its popularity exploded throughout the 1990s. Around the world, but especially in this country, chefs loved the versatility of the Chilean sea bass. They served it up grilled, broiled, blackened, and steamed to a public that couldn't get enough of it, so much so that unscrupulous chefs began to serve things like black cod under an assumed species. By the end of the decade, Chilean sea bass was the most popular fish in the world. And that was the worst thing that ever happened to it. Once its name was changed, its fate was sealed. And thus did a species perish, the first one ever to die of a brand name.

And then, once upon a time – and a very recent time it was – there was another fish, and this is the happy story of The Next Big Fish, one that has quietly begun appearing on the menus of 25 restaurants in the Boston area alone, including the Legal Sea Foods, Naked Fish, and Skipjack's chains, as well as at the Ritz-Carlton. “It's an interesting fish. It's one of the first farmed white-flesh fish, and it tastes pretty good,” says Legal Sea Foods owner Roger Berkowitz. “I have a preference for wild [fish], but Australia's the only place where they eat this fish wild. A few months ago, we started playing around with it.” The Next Big Fish has already started appearing on Legal's menu, but Berkowitz says he needs the fish to be grown bigger for the restaurant to use it more regularly. “We haven't been able to get enough product of the size we want so far – 4 pounds or bigger – and so we're working with them on that.” By 2007, 40,000 pounds of The Next Big Fish is expected to be shipped each week out to a world that is, well, hungry for it, that is looking, always, for the next big thing, and that usually finds it in the damndest places.

Places like the remotest parts of Australia, say, or the peaceful slopes of the Connecticut River Valley in Western Massachusetts. The autumn light is sharper here, honing itself between the peaks and whetting itself through the branches of the trees until it falls into the swales and valleys in shards as hard as diamonds on the eyes. It comes in bursts as the roads narrow and the towns get smaller, and you have to wait to cross the bridge that leads into Turners Falls so that the bread truck can pass over it first. Across the bridge, then, and through the small-business district, all weathered brick and old handbills, and then off through the trees and the hills again, off through the sharp and glistening light toward where the cutting edge is.

The tanks are round and deep, and they're tucked away under a flat white roof in an industrial park that surrounds the tiny airport, not far from where townspeople say Bill Cosby parks his private aircraft – which is hopefully not called The Pudding Pop. The water in the tanks moves in a constant circular motion, and there is only the faintest stirring beneath the surface until someone takes a small, foul-smelling pellet and tosses it low across the water. There is a sudden, silvery explosion, a loud snap of jaws, and a splash, and then the surface goes flat and still and silent again.

“I'm kind of in love with this fish,” says Josh Goldman, who runs the complex and who has brought the cutting edge to this unlikely place in the valley where The Cos parks his ride. “It does so much of what I am trying to achieve.” The barramundi – which means “fish with big scales” in an aboriginal dialect, or Lates calcarifer, if you're speaking Latin at home – was until very recently merely a feisty game fish hanging on the den walls of people who fish the remote Northern Territory of Australia. An admittedly ugly perch-looking creature, the barramundi is yet another product of the freakish isolation in which animals in Australia evolved. For example, it spawns in the ocean, but it moves easily through the brackish coastal waters and into the long inland stretches of freshwater streams and rivers. Aussie fisherfolk spend good money in pursuit of the barramundi, reeling in specimens in excess of 33 pounds. It also has become the whitefish of choice in Australian restaurants, from fish houses all the way up the scale to what the people in the eating industry call “white-tablecloth restaurants.” In short, it's their cod, and, like the koala and the kangaroo and Aussie-rules football, the “barra” has become one of those unique local phenomena in which Australians take a peculiar provincial pride.

Which only begins to explain how the barramundi came to Western Mass., and how it is very soon going to be coming onto your plate – if it's not already there. It seems that the barramundi is a fish for all seasons. It tastes great, and it's rich in omega-3s, those fishy proteins that are so good for the human brain and the human heart. Moreover, the barramundi turns out to be something of a natural environmental activist, nurtured without antibiotics or hormones in its innate scaly Greenhood by people who went looking for the cutting edge and who brought it to the most unlikely place in order to unleash The Next Big Fish, tasty, healthy, and blessedly guilt-free, on the rest of the world.

The barramundi in the tanks near the airfield are the breeding stock of Australis Aquaculture. The company offices are up the road – at One Australia Way, naturally – in a newer facility that also houses the tanks in which the fish are raised from fry almost to frying pan. It is, in every important sense, a farm. “It isn't logic that drove the domestication of animals,” explains Goldman, the president of Australis. “Humans tried to domesticate everything, and only the good stuff got domesticated. Aquaculture is penalized because most of it has taken place in the scientific era, so you can apply a lot of technology to things that maybe should not be domesticated. If we look more carefully and determine what's a good farm animal – what are the pigs, cows, and chickens of the fish world – we might come up with very different answers.” The science of aquaculture developed swiftly in response to the devastation wrought on the world's wild fisheries. This month, the journal Science published a sobering report in which it was argued that major ocean fisheries will be fished out by mid-century. Because it developed so fast, aquaculture also contributed in its own way to the general devastation of wild fisheries. The wild stock of fish like salmon and striped bass were being steadily depleted by overfishing. However, at the same time, as aquaculture grew in popularity, and in profitability, the immense amount of fish meal needed to feed the larger carnivorous fish being raised on the farms depleted the natural stock of feed-fish, smashing some important links in the natural food chain. For example, if you use anchovies to feed the fish that you're raising on the farms, you deplete the stock of anchovies available to the same carnivores in the wild.

Daniel Pauly, the director of the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia, calls this “farming up the food web.” The trick, it seems, is to find a way to raise fish on a farm without starving the fish still in the wild. Josh Goldman is a child of that moment in the late 1970s when the environmental movement began to deal extensively with the problem of diminishing resources, focusing first on energy supplies during the oil shock of the mid-1970s but quickly moving into the problem of creating a sustainable food supply for an ever-increasing population. As a student at Amherst's Hampshire College in the early 1980s, Goldman involved himself in environmental causes just at the moment when environmentalism allied itself with the burgeoning health-food revolution. (The movement's ur-text was Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, published in 1971, in which eating healthy was redefined as an ecological issue.) By his second year at Hampshire, Goldman was living with five other students in an on-campus apartment with a greenhouse attached in which they grew their own vegetables and raised tilapia. He also had shown a kind of natural gift for venture capitalism, helping to arrange a $500,000 grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts that was used to build a marine-ecology facility at Hampshire.

“That money,” Goldman recalls, “allowed me to do some real science around the notion of closed-system aquaculture, reusing water and so forth. You have this wonderful synthetic ecosystem that you're creating, and you get to play God a little bit.” After he graduated in 1986, Goldman's first attempt at an aquaculture business involved tilapia. He sold his stake two years later and in 1989 bought the land alongside the airport in Turners Falls and started a company called AquaFuture. There was still a lot of improvisation in what he was doing; he holds patents on everything from filtration processes to devices used to catch and eliminate dead fish from the tanks. He knew that, to build his conceptional environmentally friendly aquaculture, he'd need a lot of fresh water on site. He'd bought the land with the assurance from a drilling company that there would be plenty of water in the sand of what once had been a prehistoric lake. After a year, Goldman realized he'd been wrong. In desperation, he hired an ancient dowser from Maine. The two of them discovered that Goldman's land sat atop what was to become a system of artesian wells deep in the rocks, containing all the water he'd ever need. “Essentially, when I dug the hole,” Goldman says, “I was buying a $20,000 lottery ticket.” He built a large facility and set about raising striped bass.

He raised striped bass there for 13 years. However, because of some unusual market pressures, he began to look for another fish to raise. In the South, where states were awash in cash after the huge liability settlement they had carved out with the tobacco companies, Goldman says farmers were being paid fat subsidies to change their cash crop from tobacco to fish. More than 100 striped-bass farms opened up during the 1990s, he adds. In 2002, he sold the striped bass operation to restaurant moguls from Hong Kong. He became a consultant and helped farm arctic char in West Virginia, using reclaimed water from the coal mines. He also advised grouper farmers and dabbled in exotic species from Brazil. He needed to find his next big fish.

“It needed to be edible,” he explains. “It ought to be marketable that way, easy to reproduce, and we had to apply our principles of sustainability to that question. What's the ability to use alternative protein, so we're not stuck on the fish-meal treadmill? I started to develop criteria for what the perfect farm fish looked like. It had to be docile. It had to be versatile in the ways it could be cooked.” At about the same time Goldman was looking for a new fish to raise, an Australian entrepreneur named Stewart Graham was eating a nice barramundi lunch in Perth when he was told, to his amazement, that the fish he was eating had been raised on a farm. He started Australis in order to try to market the fish worldwide. Graham put out feelers within the international aquaculture community, and Goldman's name kept coming back to him as one of the most successful innovators in the field. Graham persuaded Goldman that the barramundi fit the criteria that Goldman had spent almost a decade developing. “They are fish that occupy fresh water, estuary, and saltwater. They basically go everywhere,” Goldman explains. “And they basically have that part of the world all to themselves. In most places, evolution drives you toward doing that one thing that you do well to survive. The barramundi hasn't had that pressure, so it's able to do a lot of different things. It has the enzymatic ability to eat a lot of freshwater ingredients, so we can feed it a lot of alternative protein sources.” Goldman and Graham joined forces and bought back the Turners Falls facility from the restaurateurs, who stayed on as stockholders when Australis went up for sale on the Australian stock market. Since then, Goldman has been raising the barramundi in Western Mass. Until Australis is completely capable of generating its own brood stock, it will depend on fingerlings flown in a quarter-million at a time once a month from Australia in special carrying cases of Goldman's own design. This costs about $50,000 per shipment – or, as Goldman reckons it, about 25 cents per tiny fish. The cases keep them healthy, unless the plane that's carrying them gets stuck on the tarmac in Los Angeles, thereby wiping out the entire shipment. “They're coming from pretty much the farthest place on earth from here,” Goldman says. “Pretty much all of them get here. Either 98 percent of them survive, or none of them do.” Once they get to Turners Falls, the fish are raised on soy-based feed (which includes some fish meal) in a series of gradually enlarging tanks. In the tanks – which Goldman also designed – a constant current keeps the fish active and healthy while sweeping the weaker fish toward the middle of the tank, where they are culled or eventually die and are sucked down into a “mort trap” at the bottom of the tank, so that the strong fish do not feed on them, thereby contracting whatever it might be that killed the weaker fish. Those fish that survive a particularly cannibalistic stage of their early development are transferred from one part of the facility to another by special conveyors called “pescalators.” After each pescalator, the fish are counted and measured. (In a further homage to the barramundi's homeland, the A, B, C, and D nursery areas of the Australis facility are called Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, and Darwin.) When they get to the facility called “Perth” – there not being an Australian capital beginning with “E” – the barramundi are chill-killed and made ready for sale. The facility now produces about 18,000 pounds of barramundi a week. And thereupon the fish reach the most treacherous part of the process for any species of fish that we use to feed ourselves. Sales.

The story of the demise of the Chilean sea bass is in every sense a cautionary tale for Goldman and his barramundi. The success of the sales campaign that changed the Patagonian toothfish into the Chilean sea bass is why, when Goldman first began marketing his fish, he briefly advertised it as Australian sea bass, even though the barramundi thrives in fresh water and is technically not a bass at all. However, Goldman also watched as, down in the waters off Chile, the factory ships once again pushed the local fishermen off what had become very lucrative fishing grounds. The toothfish grounds were quickly overfished, in part because the toothfish is such a slow-growing fish that huge numbers were caught before they'd had a chance to breed. However, demand stayed so high that early attempts to regulate the catch were confounded by pirate fishing operations that smuggled bootleg toothfish to all points of the compass. Gradually, though, international government regulators and nonprofit organizations like the National Environmental Trust managed to put in place serious environmental controls to protect what was left of the species. As a longtime advocate for environmentally friendly aquaculture, Goldman saw what he was doing as a kind of antidote to the heedless overfishing that had been the driving force of the story of the Chilean sea bass, and in the modern history of wild fisheries in general. Even before the Patagonian toothfish had been sentenced to death by brand name, the orange roughy had found itself popularized to the brink of extinction.

“Sadly, that's the history of a lot of wild fisheries,” Goldman explains. “Some resource is found that nobody knew was there. The orange roughy – down in New Zealand, they were doing experiments, fishing at great depths, and the story is they had to cut their nets because there were so many fish down there. That became the hot fish, like Chilean sea bass did later. It's notoriously hard to assess. How many fish are really out there? It's kind of like a drug, because you can make a million dollars in five days. We're shifting the notion of the hot fish to aquaculture. We're not depending on a wild fishery.” Which is not to say that his approach was entirely altruistic. In an era in which people flock to see a movie consisting of Al Gore talking about global warming, Green sells, and nowhere more than in the area of food. Whether it's suburban parents worried about mercury or restaurant patrons anxious about the survivability of their favorite entrees, there was a big opening for Goldman and his product to do well by doing good. The company shrewdly took advantage of it. “The first thing we did,” says Carol Devine, a former cable-television executive who's gone from selling Double Dare for Nickelodeon to selling barramundi for Australis, “was to pitch this as 'The Better Fish' – better tasting, better for you, better for our environment.” There were some immediate marketing problems, not the least of which was the fact that people couldn't keep the barramundi and the barracuda straight, and the fact that it took some doing to persuade restaurateurs that, while the embryonic fish came from Australia, the actual fish on the plate was local. “People had never heard of the fish, so we had to educate them,” Devine explains. “The challenge was to answer questions like, 'How can it be fresh if it's from Australia?' ” recalls Devine. “We explained to them that, yesterday, this thing was swimming in the Berkshires.” The fact that America seems to have a limitless sweet tooth for Australian products – from wine to the late Steve Irwin's adventures in the bush – gave the barramundi a kind of instant credibility.

They began by pitching their fish to top chefs by hosting a number of exclusive barramundi dinners in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. One of the chefs was Rick Moonen of Restaurant RM in New York, who has led a movement within his profession on behalf of sustainable seafood. He has since made the barramundi the poster fish for his campaign and talked it up in a laudatory story in the high-end industry journal Food Arts. On a purely culinary level, the barramundi – as thick and fatty and durable as the toothfish ever was – became an instant word-of-mouth sensation among those who've eaten it.

“It's an excellent fish, very versatile in the way that it handles various cooking techniques,” says Max Harvey, who buys fish for Jasper White. “It's very appealing to the white-tablecloth restaurants.” He adds that “the other nice thing about it is, because it's farm-raised, it's available year-round, and not many wild fish are nowadays.” Australis is gradually – and carefully – raising the barramundi's profile. The company's ultimate goal is to establish in America the same proletarian appeal that the barramundi enjoys in Australia, where it functions as the whitefish of choice in everything from the finest restaurants to the funkiest fish houses. (Order fish and chips in Sydney, and barramundi is what you'll get.) In October, Australis sent its first shipment of barramundi to Europe. Outside the Perth facility, construction is underway for a new building with eight more tanks. The cutting edge is where you find it. It's not always in obvious places. It's not always in laboratories, surrounded by the muted thrumming of sophisticated machines. It doesn't always turn up where you think it should. Often, it appears where people decide to look for it. If you're dedicated enough, you can find the cutting edge in the Antipodes and raise it in the mountains. Out here, with the light on the rivers going flat and sharp, the cutting edge is swimming around in tanks, a world away from its home, and the leaves are all beginning to turn, and it's almost winter again in Turners Falls – which means it's nearly summer in the Northern Territory of Australia, where the fishermen are going out in the warmth of the morning.

Flattieman.

Edited December 1, 2006 by Flattieman