Transcripts For CSPAN2 Karen 20240703

School with a master of arts and science journalism and has been supported by the canada for the arts and the sloan foundation. Her work has appeared in scientific canadian geographic, the globe and mail and the among others joining karen in conversation. Sabrina imbler. Sabrina imbler is the author of the essay collection how far the light reaches and the chapbook take geology, which was chosen the National Book awards, science and literature program. They are a staff writer at two factor media, an employee sports and culture site where they write about creatures and the Natural World. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming karen and to the stage. Hi, ari. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for coming tonight. Its a real joy and honor to be here in conversation with karen about this beautiful book, kings of their own ocean. Its a its a sprawling book. And i have lots of questions prepared. But i guess i just first wanted to ask, you know, there is this early in the book where you just sort of mention that the first time you saw a live tuna, a bluefin tuna was in midtwenties and tuna are just such magnificent, enormous that, you know, it clearly was a life changing moment for you. So i just was curious if, you could talk more about just first moment of encounter with the living bluefin tuna. Yeah, the first time i saw a dead tuna was when i was working as a cook and had an opportunity to cut it up for to serve at a restaurant. And so it was really is this im yeah. Okay. And it was just so i had had so much experience with freshwater through my Early Experiences that to touch a bluefin tuna like that was about probably the size of probably a couple of feet. It skin was so different its colors were so different it moved in in such a different way and i guess i understood peoples fascination with the fish but it wasnt until i had a chance go out with a boat full of commercial fishermen off of which port nova scotia that i actually understood a little bit more about the physiology and so i actually brought a video that i wanted share with you right now. So this is about a 300 to £400 bluefin tuna that has been tagged by camille and eric takada theyre acadian fishermen and they work with the scientists in the book, molly lekovic, who i interviewed for the book and shes a of a main character running through the book and so this is a tuna had been caught on rod and reel they fought it for approximately 50 minutes or so, pulling it up to the boat surfaces. It lunges up and eventually they bring it close enough to the surface where they can use a tagging stick to actually put if you look very theres like an orange tag right near its dorsal right there. And so this is one way that it was incredible to have something so abstract right . Tagging a fish. You all those things are things that we dont experience in our day to day life. Right. And so that it was a very otherworldly experience to kind of understand that im not writing about some abstract thing. Im about a living creature in relation to human life. Thats beautiful. And what a, what a cool video. I mean, to be so close but such a powerful, powerful fish. I mean, the first time ive never seen an atlantic bluefin alive, but i have seen pacific bluefin tuna live. Im at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and i feel like i always remember, like this urban legend, which i think is maybe true, that like the first time they tried to exhibit the tuna, the Monterey Bay Aquarium tried to exhibit the tuna in in the aquarium. The tuna piece, so much that they all immediately died. Ammonia poisoning because tuna are like constantly peeing because theyre going so fast. Theyre metabolizing much and that made me just really respect the tuna as just these these i mean i yeah. Anyway it was a real moment of connection for me and. I was curious, you know, there clearly big fish, but this is still so small a tuna. If you could just talk a little bit about like the physiology of their lifecycle like how. Yeah, just what what incredible animal this is. Yeah. So a lot of the fishermen who become obsessed with bluefin tuna they do it through the vehicle of the tunas body and the fact that its this prehistoric it, it evolved around 65 to 55 million years ago. It has these amazing adaptations, fins, pectoral fins that can in tight against its body in hollows almost. Its the body itself is built for this kind of speed thats required so it can get the food that it needs out the open ocean. Its one of the only fish to have to be warm bodied. You know, theres very often people say that its a warm blooded fish. Its not actually warm blooded, its warm bodied. It has this system called the reef mirror mirabella. And its what birds have in their feet that allows like a duck to stand on ice and still walk. Its this Heat Exchange system that runs through its gills, essentially allows the fish to the heat it would otherwise lose to the the ocean, the cold ocean water and channel that heat back into its eyes, its brain, its muscles. It allows this fish to reach incredible in the open ocean and and theres something about its almost like an alien. You know, theres something very otherworldly about this fish, about its ability to flash. Theres a i encountered very early on of a bluefin tuna that looked striped a zebra. And its because they these chromatic offers under their skin that allow it to to change color and shift as its in a lot of cases as its dying. So it is a kind of profound moment. Both the fish and the fishermen thats so beautiful. And and also very sad. Thats i mean, and i just have to ask, like, how big can bluefin tuna get so the largest bluefin tuna ever caught thats recorded was. 1490 £4. Yeah so i use the analogy in the book of if you have a grand piano but its shaped like a nuclear weapon. Its its enormous. And the picture theres a picture in the book and. Its its a reflection of the life span. Its the longest of the tunas. It can, you know, again, with all things ocean. Right. Its, you know, how much do we really know . But they can live approximately 20 and 30 years. So and they start as these itty millimeter wide larvae. And so it really is a bit of a miracle that any tuna grows. So big. Yeah, well, i want to talk a little bit about the structure of this book, which i think is really brilliant in in ways its a biography of. Two intersecting lives, one human and one tuna. The human is named al anderson, and hes like a, he came across this incredibly gruff in the book. He was hes a skipper from narragansett, rhode island, and he actually approached tuna fishing a totally new way. And wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about how you encountered the story of al anderson and why decided to center it in this book . Yes. So al anderson, was this kind of larger than life figure who up. So first i discovered a fish and her name. She had been dubbed amelia by one of the scientists that i report on in the book and Amelia Amelia earhart, the female aviator who crossed the Atlantic Ocean. And so i discovered this and i brought this story to the Masters Program that i was on in the time when i was living in new york. And i brought the idea a few people and said, who would ever buy a book about a fish . Me well, where where are you . Sabrina no, but its a good question. A good question, yeah. Like where . You know whats the market . And i, i realized and i people even in, in my, in my personal life who said, you know, love nonfiction, but just dont think i would read a book about a fish. And the deeper i learned about the the he had the the fish had first been tagged by al anderson and if you in a quick Google Search al anderson he it spit out all these really interesting and tagging information on fish tagging he had written it also showed that he had recently died and for a journalist thats it feels thats the its like a canal now now is that you know theres a person who was alive who lived in the world who you. No have access to. And so i reached out to his widow numerous ways and eventually she said, sure, you know, lets you can come visit me in rhode island. And so i drove to narragansett and she opened her home to me, her heart to me she shared stories that she had never shared with anyone, including and a remarkable archive of documents and tagging records and journals, photographs, including this one of him. This is on the right hand side. This is him. Look at the size of this striped bass. You know, this gives you a sense of how much the size of fish have changed in our lifetimes. Hes in the right on the with the ball cap. And then he was a a damaged boy who turned to fishing to essentially himself a sense of order in the universe, you know, a way to make sense of his own life in the context of a lot of hardship he eventually became a High School Biology teacher and there is this is him dressed as mr. So its a great costume we could be that next year for halloween we could be self and eventual lee you know and as i document in the theres a lot of kind of drama that ensues in terms of his personal life but one thing that he realized on is that by catching a fish tagging it and setting it free it gave him an ability to start to to almost dive under the ocean with these fish, to understand them in like a profound way that helped him organize how he saw the world and how he made sense his own life. And that seemed like a way if i could get people to fall in love with al and to understand how and why he fell in love with amelia. The fish the bluefin tuna, then maybe they could start to understand the value of protecting this, this kind of life. Yeah. I mean, it was really, really interesting to learn about sort of battle that he had trying convince people of the merit of tagging you know because i guess when i first learned about like tagging animals especially marine animals you think about know you tag whales theyre so big we are not whaling them at this moment or, at least like the people who are tagging them are not. But, you know, tagging a fish, its like a whole different ballgame, generally, much smaller. But tuna are so big and clearly it can take a tag or something. This book taught me, i guess, you know evidenced by owl and the other people who populate this book or how many peoples lives are intertwined with tuna. And you know, this book, theres a whole cast of characters who have different beliefs around to it and they all have different stakes in it. You know, theyre a Research Scientist like molly luckovich. Is that how you pronounce your name . Businessman like fisherman. The women who married the fishermen who often fish themselves the religious leader son, myung moon, who i had never heard of until this book. You know, they all have have a stake in the future of tuna, and they all ostensibly want the same, you know, to ensure that tuna are in the future, to be fished. But yet they so many of them, like disagree very vehemently with each other and believe that you know the right way to achieve that goal just can take different forms. So i was curious if you could talk little bit about how you assemble all the cast of characters in this and also how you sort of, you know, their contrasting memories and opinions of various events where you dont really have access to, the truth, but, you know, theyre telling you different things. Yeah, that is such a good question. And it was part of the complexity of writing and structuring this book, partially because. Theres so much money involved, so much history, theres a lot of loaded emotions. I grew up in a generation where saving the bluefin felt like the ultimate goal of of how we addressed bluefin tuna as consumers. And so as i dove the stories i found heres couple of the main characters youll. One is alan hook hansen here thats him posing with the reverend Sun Myung Moon and two of his sons. And to employees volunteers of the unification church. And its this completely wild story about the kind of the the linking of religious cult with the value of bluefin in the seventies as the value for the fish to rise and how that influenced the price that was being paid here in america for the fish but also just the United States is entire sushi industry, which is a largely underreported story. So Alan Hodgkinson wrote, a memoir of his time in the church. This down in the bottom left is hes still alive and hes living in korea with his wife, whom he married at the Worlds Largest marriage ceremony in madison garden. And since were here in new york, theres a big kind of new york, reverend Sun Myung Moon in relation to the rise of the sushi industry in japan another major, major rivalry that caught my attention early on was between the some of the renowned environmental, carl safina and, the pretty much unknown bluefin scientist molly luckovich, coming from, you would probably be familiar with barbara bach. Shes kind of the famous bluefin tuna tagging scientist. Molly luckovich is is kind the woman who lost out in the rivalry in an industry that pitted women against each other. You know there can only be one right for a very long time in lot of scientific fields still even and so this is a picture of carl safina when he was 30 years old, he became renowned for writing a book that led the charge to save the bluefin and to put it on a list of species that it was illegal trade in on an international stage. But this is a fish that he caught and killed in 1985. And so this picture never been published. It and this is me with i basically talk my way into his house and cooked him dinner at his cottage. This is him in the bottom and those are his those are his dogs. He is three dogs. And so he he i this is a funny story. I showed up to his cottage and he had just been in a fundraiser and i was hungry. It was dinnertime and i said, you know, where can i eat in winter in montauk and said, well, nowhere but i have this cooler of really old gross food. And i also need to go visit my neighbor. I said, well, im a trained cook, so how about you go visit your neighbor and i will figure something out. So i used the old kale, a single egg and some blue, some fish that he had smoked himself and made this epic caesar like kale, caesar salad. And he came back to house and we had this amazing conversation again about bluefin and about his with the fish. And it was just this extremely generous, wonderful experience that beyond that kind of public facing the bluefin narrative that has really dominated since the nineties. And then molly luckovich know they had essentially a lifelong rivalry both the shared goal of trying to save this fish. And so molly worked commercial fishermen and, spotter pilots kind of in the historic tradition fisheries and the book documents kind how they first clashed and and kind of the nitty gritty of what their personal fight was about. It encapsulates a lot of the bigger fight around and around Environmental Management that i think is important to highlight now in this present moment. Yeah. I mean, i found mollys so inspiring and like, obviously it was incredibly disappointing to see, you know, the funding sort of shrivel over the years and to her to, you know, downgrade to smaller and offices and eventually just, i think, work out of her garage. But like what a commitment to tuna that that woman has, which i mean, i guess is true of anyone who appears in this book. Is there a little tuna freak. I also wanted to ask i mean so this this book i mean does so much you know theres all these little digressions the history of tuna like i love reading about how i think the romans just catch a single enormous tuna salt it and then just send it in like feed a whole troop because like thats how big they were. But it also gets really into the nitty gritty tuna policy and how it sort of changed as the demand has skyrocketed, people have learned more and more about the actual lives of tuna. And you debunk two really big tuna myths, which i would love to talk about. So the first, you know, they were both guess touted for four years by various officials. But as you in the book, never actually serve the tuna or the science. And so the first of those is maximum yield. Do you want to talk about mms . Why . Yeah. So i never anticipated it. When i started this book, i would become like deep in the guts of modern fishery science. But here i so this is and how human choice and agency can shape science in a way that we dont even understand in the current moment. So this is Wilbur Chapman was a he worked for the u. S. Government after the Second World War and he basically saw as a way of feeding u. S. Troops abroad economically, giving them a healthy protein. And he came up what was an idea. It was, well, fish eat food in the ocean. There must come a point at which that food starts to decline. Relative to the population. Theres a graph here. And so at the top of the curve, were basically doing fish a favor by catching them because theres that that top level the curve they they if they keep eating the population will start to decline relative to the food source and so is just an idea he had he was like i think thats how it works. And a few years a mathematician said i can probably make an equation for that. And that was cornerstone of u. S. Fisheries policy for the past 60 years. And it led to, what, this bottom photo on the right with Michael Lerner and tommy gifford. This idea that the sea is inexhaustible that thats the thing that we can keep taking from and taking from and taking from. And there will be no repercussion. So that was first kind of major debunking and its really satisfying to go through the the science and to come to a conclusion and like that in a book like this because i think you have all these, you know, up and coming marine biologists like we we owe it to them and we it to humanity to say, you know, this is just an idea. And ideas can wrong and people can be wrong and we can better. Yeah. I mean, i feel like in Many Industries lots of bad policies could probably be traced back to a hunch that some guy had. And then someone was like, well, ill graph it. Well, the second theory is the two stock theory, which i just is, was very i just the is so big and its so funny to think about and people are like, well, we find the fishers of the fish probably stay here all the time, but for the tuna, it proved to be a very different story. Do you want to talk about two stock theory . Yeah, this is like the ultimate hubris. And this is still a policy that is making a tuna. Its influencing International Policy today and it still really has a hold on how bluefin tuna are managed. And so for me, it was important to address it directly. So really the theory codified in 1981, this is the graph you essentially have bluefin tuna spawning the in the mediterranean, you have bluefin tuna in the gulf of mexico. And essentially to protect the us side of, the fish, the america proposed, the delegation proposed drawing a line directly down the middle, the Atlantic Ocean at 45 degrees and theyre like, this is the line. And so tuna, stay on this side and tuna will stay on this side. And i guess the couple will cross back and forth and again. But well just manage them completely separately. Its funny. Its like even though they known since like for hundreds of years, you would have bluefin tuna showing up on the shores. The United States with mediterranean in their mouth. You know, the tags in, the fifties fish went back and forth between the United States and norway this was commonly known, but it was just political convenience to split the i use the analogy from the bible of king solomon of essentially just like cut baby in half and be done with it. The united was the one that proposed cutting the baby in half in this case, and thats what made tagging and allies work ultimately really important is that it needed this body of Scientific Data to essentially over decades and decades and decades of completely like being humiliated by other fishermen. The narragansett docks, not knowing that that that work would live past his lifetime. And thats what, you know, it felt very satisfying to say this is a fiction. Yeah. I mean, it feels like very obvious maybe in some ways tuna swim all around the ocean. But theres this tuna that goes viral occasionally on twitter. Terry the tuna . Yeah. Who . Oh, you probably know that. Know terry stotts better than i do. I do not know terry stotts better than you do. Well, terry, just gone everywhere. And like terry has been tagged and theyre like, look at terry going back and forth and back forth and back and forth, like across the whole atlantic. And it just blows peoples minds just i mean, obviously, yeah, the ocean is a big place, but the fact that like a single tuna can go so far and clearly like has, has purpose. Yeah. And this is and this is it is. And i feel like this is where our work overlaps is, like the human hubris of being like. We can only understand and protect what. We know and we can and but that limits. There are so many things that are so unknowable, right . Yeah its beautiful. Well, im really happy about this is a a tuna larvae, right . A single little tuna. You know, if this was on a finger, would just be like a pin top. Like thats its just like the head of pin on your finger is how big that fish is. Its so tiny. And i mean that actually, segways really to my next question, just in that, you know, i learned in this book that any adult tuna has like beaten incredible odds to make it to adulthood. You say or its true that about of 30 million fertilized eggs actually make it to full adulthood but the tuna at heart of this book amelia she is of an even more iconic tuna because she was iconic the interior angel. I dont know i would love to get in a room together meeting of minds but she crossed ocean and beat really impossible odds and that she was captured three times in her life which is rare for tuna first by islander sin in 2004. But ill actually know. Didnt capture amelia alone so. Could you talk about that that the day of amelias first capture so this was one of part of what writing this book felt like solving mystery or you know, who was holding the gun, right . So when i had access to als documents via daryl, i knew the number and through the tag number, i knew what day on which the fish had been tagged. And so i went back through. Als meticulous day planners and the notes that his wife daryl actually in his fishing log and found the name of the fisherman that he that caught it that was on his boat the day that amelia had been tagged and so this phone number you cant see the bottom of it for a reason it still works like 15 years later, basically that amazing its incredible. It had fly and then if you then i through another couple of hours of searching found the journal entry that tells you how many fishy tech that day what the winds were where they were exactly the coordinates he kept these meticulous records of every fishing day he ever did. Its it was kind of wild but what a resource for a journalist mean when just in the in the notes ive seen that scientists take like is incredible handwriting like this meticulous note taking and the 400 deposit you know he kept the money was very important to him because hed grown up so poor and then eventually had a chance to visit a whole tuna on the darby bank with the with the jar cards and to see the fish that size was, was really quite remarkable. And then eventually through the reporting of this book, i this was a photo that Jason Williams had a paper copy of. He pdf do it for me and i know. And so this fish may have actually been amelia the fish that eventually ended up on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And its extremely rare to this number of data points on a single fish. I eventually went to the south of spain where i spent some time with the fishery, the ancient fishery of the ahmedabad, and catching this fish and eventually ended up in portugal and found this the actual tag that molly had embedded in this fishs body in 2007 and that more than a decade later ended up in the south of spain. I mean, it really just such a what a remarkable life for tuna and what a remarkable data point for scientists. So amelia was first tagged by al in 2004, and then she was tagged later by molly after she had spawned likely may have spawned and then come all way back to the you know, this is the thing is that once the tag disappears, dont know where they go. Although once she was tagged by amelia and to by. In 2007, molly put in a pop up satellite tag. So it actually sends signals to a satellite and you could track on a map kind of where amelia traveled up along the atlantic seaboard and then she goes dark. And so a lot of my kind of reconstructing her life is based on a lot of really interesting thats been done on, you know, how do they smell . How do they perceive, how do they move . And then the data point was when molly got a call from the portuguese scientist who was reported this tag . They thought it was a parasite embedded under her skin. So finally, i guess it kind of looks like a copepod like. Lots of coffee pods are kind of like dangly and the one of the things this is a crucial thing about tagging is that if you if you take a fish and catches it and sells the fish for money, doesnt report it, does it have meaning, right . Yeah. But in this case they totally did think i think god they, they found the tag. They like dunked it in chlorine or something to get rid of the smell. And then you went to see the tag in person. Can you talk a little bit about like after all this time trying to down the the sort of elusive life of this tuna like what it like to sort of encounter her in in death just through this tag. Yeah it it was spooky. It was it felt like the culmination felt like a climax of some kind. I was extremely nervous. The scientist who i was talking to was extremely brusk and i was saying, you know, are you worried about the bluefin tuna. And he was the first person who told me, im not worried about. The bluefin tuna. You know, im worried about how we as humans live on the planet, how we eat too much fish, how our appetites are outsized. But the bluefin tuna is actually doing fine. And so it felt strange to see amelia through his eyes as, not this kind of magical that i had idolized, but as a data point, it a data point for him. And he was like, theyre doing fine. Wow. I mean, i guess im curious, like, why did he save the tag then all those years . Because it is quite rare to have fish at large for that period of time in the ocean. It is its you know, when molly first called me and we first chatted, she said its like christmas. Its a needle in a haystack. Except imagine the haystack is, the entire ocean. Its a very big haystack. Were you able to have like a moment alone with the tag or was the scientist there as well . So he did this precious moment for you, there he was there. And i think he i think thought i was deranged because i basically like you see the photo of me holding thats my hand. And i just it felt like a communion it felt i had been in als basement. I had touched his things. I had kind channeled that. But i, i was touching the tag. And molly had this tag and it had in the world for so long, external of all of us, and that it felt extremely special. How long did you get to spend with it before you had to give it back . Until it got weird. I probably 15 minutes and then he basically had to take it away for me. Like this. This is going to steal my time. So there was a moment where he was like its like it just sits in a vial and i was like, i didnt i didnt suggest that i could take it, but i really wanted to would like i built it a little altar. I take really good care of it. So no but but it was it was and it was the last pretty much last day of my reporting trip. So id seen large fish in spain. And then i traveled westward to portugal and thats when i found the tag. Thats beautiful. I mean, maybe, maybe itll be willed to you someday. And i should send pedro a note. Yeah. Just like you must be like, you know, youre in this book. It was really meaningful. Well, i. I want to go back to al sort of the man at the heart of this. Um, i mean, after after reading about all of the tuna, everyone who works with tuna in this book and just hearing about the grueling physical process that it is to actually reel a fish that can fight for hours sometimes like until, you know, it actually its own meat with its own body because of the arduous nature of that fight, it takes a certain kind of person to catch a tuna and to like a tuna. It sounded really difficult and not like an experience i would really want to have. But clearly al loved it. And you paint such a rich portrait of this man who, as you mentioned, you know, had this really difficult, was bounced around various locations from various, you know, after his parents divorce like between his parents and these difficulties definitely followed him throughout his life and sort of created difficulties for the people who loved him and, the people who knew him. And i was curious, you could sort of talk about the approach that you took to sort of telling this whole and complicated story of al. Yeah, from the very beginning it was obvious to me that al was extremely conflicted. Protagonist of the book. It was important to me talking to his widow that hes not going to be some perfect person. Hes not going to be a martyr. Hes not you know, he was a person who hurt people really deeply and he was an extreme jerk to a lot of people while he was fishing. It was so funny when you talk about like the like messages that were left on his like obituary page or whatever people like, well, like if i was fishing with him, like i would see him and like that was the nice that you said. Like you knew. You knew he was around. He make his presence known exactly. But he i dont think we need to be perfect in order to do meaningful work and to have that work outlive us. When my cousin jillian is here with her kids and. My grandfather, their great great grandfather before he died, he planted an orchard of peach trees. Um, that would probably not. That he would never eat single peach off of those trees and. It takes a certain type of person to do this, taking work where youre doing the work youre spending, those. Youre spending those hours and youre just trusting that the thing will live on past your own lifetime. Right it. Takes a certain way of seeing and the nature of data and the nature of our own kind of puny human lifespans. And i think the fact that al was, a deeply flawed person and that darryl trusted me enough with that story, its kind of the heart and soul of the book. And if you can understand that these human choices, that all the choices we make as consumers, as people who eat fish, as people who are interested in fishing, and people who interact the Natural World that yeah. That those choices and that and that were all making them day. You know youre here today with me, you know, maybe i will live on a little through you guys. So i, he really left such a, such a big legacy like not only of yeah. Imprinting upon people the importance of tagging but also physically like he left, he tagged so tuna like in his logs which you write about like him keeping a note of like what . Like the hundreds and hundreds of tuna that he tagged and how many of those tuna i like to think about, like just swimming out there with their own little tags waving after them in the ocean today. I want to talk a little bit about the reporting that you did for this book, because it is an interNational Book, a tuna and you go to portugal, you go to japan to all these different places that have intimate relations of the tuna. What the craziest moment of sort of this reporting in person that you did for the book probably seeing the the oh the craziest moment there be more than okay so i told this story a little bit backstage but so i went to japan is really important country for this book because and i didnt want it to be a two dimensional place because the japanese relationship to fish very much informed kind of the trajectory of the fish over time and our for it but the market had been closed down thats kind of the old historic tokyo market and moved to a new location called, the tokyo supermarket, and it hadnt yet opened to the public. And so i essentially broke in while i was there and, you know, used my Google Translate app to say, im a canadian journalist. I am only here for one more day. Please please, please, please let me. And that didnt. And so eventually there was a private tour group that was paying some big bucks to get backstage access. And i basically just, like, spied my way in behind them and eventually hung out in the bluefin tuna room. Theres pictures of above the auctions you can actually watch this the tuna being auctioned off with hand signals, a little ding dong bell and ding dong bell going like bing, bing, bing, bing and to watch the the human market for this fish and then to if you turn to you all the all the fresh live fish that have been shipped directly from the United States, in some cases europe. And then, you turn to your right. And its just a massive floor like four gymnasiums of frozen solid tuna bodies, each with a trench cut off from its tail set atop it so they can gauge quality of the flesh. The like when they caught it. But a trench from the core. And then theres a literal Cross Section off the back of the tail and thats they sell those fish every single day. Thats the appetite. And so to get a of that scale, you dont get it here in north america largely as a consumer because because what we see, what we consume, what were given access to is so paltry. The beautiful thing is with the rise of bluefin tuna populations and with you know these sustainably caught bluefin, you know can go to my local sushi place in dartmouth nova scotia and. Right now its bluefin tuna season and theyre getting it from Prince Edward island. And its on a rod and reel and it is a tasty fish and it is a sustainably managed fishery. And i dont think its a its ultimately a really hopeful story i dont i wouldnt have thought that in my lifetime that we would have that we could actually save something. Right. Yeah. I mean, its very hopeful. And i admit, like when i first opened this book, my i was sort of dreading a future where i couldnt eat. I thought that this was this would be a book that could tell that i could not eat the bluefin tuna. And i was so glad to know that i could. But also, as you were saying backstage, like, this book really does encourage you to develop a relationship with the origin of your fish and like when go into a restaurant and order bluefin tuna, you can ask like, where did you get this from and like learn like, is this a sustainably fish like and to also tell the people who run that restaurant, you know, like are questions that people have. And this is like, you know, an act of care that that the consumer is having for the future, this fish and for the future of future generations who want to consume fish. Its like we live. We are we are nature right . And we can we can consume other, but we can do it in a way that thats not self. Right. And ultimately thats the little version of the story that hopefully be extrapolated more largely kind of culinary culture and gastronomy and global capitalism. No pressure. No pressure. I mean, just just hearing you, i guess, talk about those thoughts and, you know, visiting this market in person, sneaking in, i im just curious, like this book, it really its so much and you are present just in these moments where you sort of share your own relation, own relationship to tuna or your own relationship. Your father and i was curious if you could talk a little bit about how you decided what parts of yourself you wanted to bring the book and what parts you wanted to leave out . Yeah. So i come from a hard news background, investigative background. So the idea using i or me just made me extremely nauseous. I have an incredible supportive writing group. Some members are here today and they were insistent, you know, some of them, one person in particular, tina, would say, i care about fishing. I dont care about fish. What is tagging . What is tagging . What is tagging . And i realized that i had to explain first who i was and then why this mattered and that that i that i had the process of reporting this book. I had become with al because, i was mourning the loss of my father. And there were parts of al that really reminded me of my dad. And so allowed me to come to that kind of universal that know capital u universal of you know why do we do anything and and thats why i kind of started the book with an ending and ended the book with a beginning is because, you know, in a lot of indigenous cultures, you know, time a circle and we are connected to both our present and our past and our future at the same, you know, at the same time, i think acknowledging that that this is its not about me. Its us. Its about the collective. Yeah. No, thats thats really beautiful, um, i wanted to ask is there if there is anything that you had to cut out of the book that didnt make it in, that youd want to talk about now. Yeah, i had to cut some of my personal firsthand experience going out, for instance, with the jack cards instances that didnt quite fit the chronology or its a somewhat sort of flowing structure. I wanted it to so easy to read. I want it to be kind of like a romp, like some of my favorite nonfiction to read. And so, yes, as a result i had to leave out some of the personal kind of firsthand reporting. You know, how could you write a book about bluefin tuna without having, you know stood by one, you know, seen its blood leave its body you know, i needed to be there in the moment of death as much as i had to be in the moment of life. Yeah. And i mean, i feel like that really helped you, like, paint the picture of amelias death, which was obviously a moment where you werent present for, but you were able to sort of recreate through being with other tuna just like her. Um, im getting the signal that we. Its now time to transition to audience questions. So i want to open up the room. And as anyone have a question. If you have one, raise your hand. Well bring you a microphone. I see one right here. How much is the right amount of tuna to eat and how much is the right amount of tuna to fish . That is a really great question. I eat tuna more than once a week bluefin. But think eating, you know, one plate of nigiri week is a reasonable amount. For me thats a personal choice ive made i think the right amount of tuna fish miraculously and this that kind of part of the happy ending of the book is that in last fall, a policy called harvest was passed at iccat, which is the International Governing Body for tuna, and it essentially turns the fisheries of the fish from this political black box where. The scientists give the data, the politicians take it, and then they say, okay, and then some arbitrary number gets spit out through the Kind International debates around quotas, harvest strategy inputs, all the tagging data, all the catch records, all the kind of where where our understanding of where the fishes. And then it spits out a scientifically defensible number, maximum sustainable yield. And and those using those policies, its shown remarkable recoveries in the southern ocean. And it hopefully will translate into the right amount is the number for that year generally aided by the science as we have it right now. And so may change it may go up and down. The bluefin tuna has shown itself to be somewhat climate proof or resilient because it breeds in warm water, because it can travel into open ocean, it can migrate such in extraordinary distances. So, you know, that will insulate somewhat from a warming ocean. So for now its a good news story. But again, staying vigilant, its not the last word. So as you research this book, did you find any other stories that interested you and or underreported things that you thought there was area to do Something Else in . Yes so the role of women fisheries is particularly something i found extremely fascinating in which part specifically theres was a picture that was black and white of a mikmaq indigenous woman posing with a giant bluefin tuna. And so the role i ended up writing an essay that will come out relatively soon about the origin of women being bad luck on a boat. I got encountered a lot of personal misogyny when im doing this reporting as a woman most of the books written about bluefin tuna and, about fish generally are written by men. So the idea of that women have always at sea and women have always fished, and that women are. So i think thats i think that is it definitely placed a bit of a a niggle in for future work of kind of tracing that back and doing a service to future female anglers as well. I think we kind of danced around, but i just wanted to get your a little bit more about your approach to writing. I know with science writing and especially about youre trying to sometimes things that are so abstract far and even invisible concepts, especially to us as terrestrial creatures, is how do you go about approaching, you know, writing about these these really foreign phenomena to us . Yeah. And i think sabrina should also answer this question after me because, their book, how for the light, which is was a book that i read while i was working on this book. And i thought a lot about that anthropomorphizing and the pros and the cons and it helped that the fish. Had drawn specific interest one specific fish had drawn the scientists specific interest and it wasnt too much a stretch too that we had these data points and then it just became an issue of how can i responsibly thread the needle the fishs lifecycle in a way that felt journalistically responsible. Im careful never to say to ascribe emotion, but i can ascribe feeling because we do have understanding of fish perception. For instance, i have a sentence of when shes in the pen about be killed. And i said she would have smelled tasted there there blood in the water of the other tuna. We know that she would have and tasted that blood so i think yeah doing it doing it a way that does that serves the science as the back with the science is the backbone but with human compulsion at the forefront. Yeah i mean its such a good and i think something that like its a Perfect Question for this book because. I think amelia is such an effective for us even though yeah, there is no anthropomorphism we dont like think think about what she was like as a teenager but you were humans like we relate to character is like we its its easier think at least for me to understand the story of an individual rather than like sort of these vast sprawling of tuna that traverse the whole like world in a way that thats not like an experience i that i can relate to. But i think its so effective to really. Yeah. Follow this one tuna as sort of like a yeah. A portal into the larger species and. I think a lot of my own approach to this i think you do really well here in, you know, thinking about amelias perceptual is just thinking about the work. Ed yong, who is a really wonderful science journalist who i think has done really good work of trying to about animals on their own terms and not know what we might project on to them or, how they might make us feel, but rather to understand, like, what is this animals experience of the world . And i think you did this really wonderfully in this book. Thank you. Thanks for the question. I thought about it a lot. If if there are no questions, i havent have one more question for you. All right. I was just curious, like while you were writing this book, like, what were the books that you looked to for guidance or the books that gave you comfort or books that, you know, you felt like were in conversation with this book . Oh, definitely book. You should all own it and buy it and read it. Its great book. I read a book called the run by john hay. Its a story of the cape lynne run in, maine and thinking a little bit about i read a lot of any dillard i, i tried i tried to gravitate towards female all writers of nature i love Elizabeth Gilbert does some really beautiful like micro scenes of nature and poetry. I read a lot of poetry trying to kind of abstract that Human Experience and honestly, owls publish manuscript. I write a little bit in the book about my my relation to but writing is such a way its so personal right its like seeing someones heart on the page and to to at least have this piece him this ephemera left after hes. And i just when i got a note from daryl after she read the book because i thought lot about, you know, how do you capture and do someones life justice and and she said, l would have this book. And so to have that, you know, this photo was taken a couple of weeks before he died of a heart attack. And you know, its it was a real privilege, really, and an honor to get to know a single, flawed human life thats so beautiful and. He really is his so present on the page. I think really is a feat. I think thats a perfect note to end on. So can we all give a big hand to i would like say that it is truly an this evening welcome captain u. S. Navy retired