Four Fish (14 page)

Conservationists were also starting to gain ground. In 1982, the same year that the International Whaling Commission passed a global moratorium on the hunting of whales, the eastern United States’ favorite bass, the American striped bass, reached its lowest population levels on record, resulting in a similar moratorium several years later. American striped bass, a fish that early English settlers probably named after the European sea bass, had declined precipitously throughout the 1970s to their lowest levels in history. Thanks to a protracted effort led by sportsmen and conservationists, all fishing, sport or commercial, was banned for three years. Also in 1982, another popular fish called bass, the California white sea bass, was facing similar regulatory reductions. In that year the Mexican government would ban the United States from fishing for white sea bass in Mexican waters, thereby removing yet another bass from marketers’ rosters.

In response, in 1983, still another “bass” was to appear in markets in Asia and America—a fish called the Patagonian toothfish, that sold poorly until it was renamed “Chilean sea bass.” An international niche for a white, meaty, basslike fish was starting to open up around the world. And for Thanasis Frentzos it seemed that the chance to “catch a sea bass” in the literal and financial sense of the Greek expression was close at hand.

Greece in 1982 was not an easy place to finance a risky venture. A military junta known as “The Colonels” had been ousted less than a decade earlier, and the country was still seen as something of a European banana republic. But Cephalonia is known as an island of eccentrics and risk takers. Its patron saint is St. Gerasimos—the protector of holy fools. Thanasis was lucky enough to have a friend in Marinos Yeroulanos, a civil engineer-turned-entrepreneur and fellow Cephalonian. Yeroulanos loaned Thanasis the equivalent of two yearly salaries for a marine biologist, as well as his yacht, and, in the tradition of earlier Cephalonians, Thanasis set out on a thirty-foot sailboat with a tiny engine across a dangerous sea
.

On arriving in Sicily, Frentzos stopped at the holding station where he was to pick up his fish. He was deeply unimpressed. The owners had gotten their hands on a load of three-inch sea bass from an Italian research institute and had reared them in a lagoon to the size where they could be sold. Loading up Frentzos’s tanks, the Italians raised their eyebrows at his jerry-rigged boat but gladly accepted the payment—twenty-eight thousand dollars—a fortune in Europe at a time when banks were charging an average of 20 percent interest for business loans.

Sailing out of the harbor, Frentzos began to feel more hopeful. He calculated how much the load might be worth if he were to manage to get the sea bass home and grow them to their full market weight. After growing his twenty thousand little sea bass to market weight, about two pounds each, multiplied by fifty dollars per fish. . . . Could it really be a
million dollars
? Of course there would be expenses. And inevitably there would be some mortality.

But most fish mortality happens during the very first days of a fish’s existence, a phase that Thanasis, a student of ichthyoplankton, knew well—the microscopic yet monstrous-looking forms fish take when they are first hatched. During his time in New Zealand, Thanasis had spent countless hours looking at these strange pre-fish fish through a microscope, watching them float across a two-dimensional plane that seemed a mile long, fluttering and spinning, breathing through their larval gills, dying when the fragile balance of food, salt, water, and oxygen shifted ever so slightly. All this examination was so new in the 1970s that he and his colleagues were constantly coming across previously unknown species. Thanasis, being the only speaker of Greek in the lab, was often called over to a colleague’s microscope and asked to come up with a scientific name that matched the weird organism on the slide. “That dorsal fin looks like a bridge,” one of them would say. “Thanasis, what’s the Greek word for ‘bridge’?”

Years of watching the dance of larval fish had taught him that nature’s winnowing is most likely to take place at this delicate, hypersensitive stage. But later, off the coast of Sicily, his boat full of tiny sea bass, Thanasis felt he was past all that
.
The fish in his barrels lashed to the gunnels of his borrowed boat, were three inches long—they were
already
survivors. The Italians had already paid the price of the initial attrition in growing them out to fingerling size. In his view the Italians had taken the risk, and Thanasis was going to get the windfall by growing them out to market size and selling them at a tremendous profit. Poetic justice for a Greek who had seen his home sea emptied of wild bass by Greece’s greatest classical rival.

All these thoughts must have been on Thanasis’s mind as the mountains of Sicily faded into the distance. Which is when the wind started to blow. . . .

 

 

 

B
efore a strong wind blows on the Mediterranean, a crystal-clear sky is usually observed over the dark purple blue plain of the sea. Such was the case as Sicily dropped behind Thanasis’s boat. By nightfall all that had changed when a freak early summer storm hit. Soon a force-seven wind was blowing up behind the boat, driving the prow down under the waves. The sea bass in their ad hoc barrels were secured to the side of the boat with heavy chain and fine-meshed screens over the tops to keep them from sloshing into the sea. But the oxygen tanks that were aerating the water were listing in their housings and pulling at the hoses that led down into the water. Thanasis and the captain stayed inside the wheelhouse while the tanks clanked ominously against one another. If they were to become detached from their hoses, the fish would surely die.

Staring out the window of the wheelhouse at twenty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of sea bass fingerlings proved too much for Thanasis. Holding on to the stays of the mainsail, he pulled himself out onto the deck of the boat. Waves running across the bow blew up into clouds of spray, sending stinging salt into his eyes. Gazing out over the chaotic scene, he could see what looked like an oxygen tank rolling back and forth over the hose that fed into the live wells. He crawled on his hands and knees and reached out for the tank. It rolled away from his fingers, then back, then away again. Finally he made one last lunge and held on to its edge. But just as he did so, the captain grabbed his shoulder and pulled him inside. “It’s not worth it,” the captain said. “It’s not worth going to the bottom of the sea for a bunch of fish.”

On and on the wind blew throughout the night, turning the boat round and round. All headings were lost in the wind, and the darkness and the night seemed as if they would never end. But end they did. A rosy-fingered dawn began to glow in the east. Thanasis and the captain staggered on deck.

“What is the first question a sailor asks when he is in trouble?” Thanasis wondered aloud to me two decades later, before deftly filleting a cooked sea bass we were sharing for lunch. He raised his substantial eyebrows for the punch line. “You might think this sailor would ask, ‘Do I have anything to drink?’ or ‘Do I have any food?’ But no. That’s not what he asks. What he asks is, ‘Where am I?’ ”

In the distance on that frightening June morning in 1982, they could see a headland of sorts, but it was unclear if it was an island or a continent. And since orientation has a strange persistence in the human mind (i.e., what started out as south on the port side must
still
be south, even though you have turned in a hundred circles since that initial orientation was fixed), Thanasis felt a knot in the his gut. He felt sure that this land could be nothing other than Mu’ammar al-Gadhafi’s Libya, directly to the south of Sicily and a famed pirate haven at the time. How would he ever get the boat back to the Greek entrepreneur who had loaned it to him? Why the hell had he abandoned the life of a simple oceanographic researcher to become a fish farmer?

But as they approached the land, the outline of a familiar house came into view. It was a large, many-windowed cottage with the characteristically jade green Ionian shutters, still closed up tight from the previous night’s storm. It looked just like a house Thanasis knew well, the house of an acquaintance named Claudatos, who lived on a promontory overlooking his home harbor. “My God,” Thanasis whispered, “could that actually be Claudatos’s house?” He waved and shouted, and soon Claudatos himself emerged onto the portico, waving back, the morning sun glinting pleasantly off his bald head. The wind, like some kind of Athena-driven lackey god, had blown the boat safely back to Cephalonia. Thanasis embraced his captain and breathed a vast sigh of relief. It was only then that he noticed that one of the oxygen tanks had come to rest on the aeration hose leading into the sea bass tanks. The hose was kinked, and the tank had pinched it closed. Peering apprehensively into the barrels, Thanasis saw, in miniature, the scene he’d beheld after the Italians had dynamited his home reefs: thousands of tiny sea bass, their swim bladders filled with gas, floating belly-up in the water, suffocated to death.

But Thanasis discovered that amid all these dead fish a few in each tank had survived even without oxygen. He counted the fish one by one. There were exactly 2,153 survivors. These few fish, selected by their ability to withstand stress and oxygen deprivation, were to be the founders of a global race of sea bass.

 

 

 

T
he ring tone on Thanasis Frentzos’s mobile phone is an excerpt from a radio broadcast of the 2004 European Football Championship. In that game Greece, an eighty-to-one long shot, played the vastly superior Portuguese team to a 0-0 draw for almost the entire match. Finally, with just a few minutes to go, Angelos Charisteas sprang into the air and headed a corner kick into the right side of the net. “Goaaaaaaallllll! Greece one, Portugal zero!” screams Thanasis Frentzos’s mobile phone when someone wants to get hold of him.

A last-minute victory against long odds is exciting to all small nations. But Greeks feel such a victory with particular pride and sense of justice. As the very
founders
of the scientific method, many Greeks believe they
should
lead the world, and after so many years as Europe’s lowliest economy, they rejoice heartily at any successes that come their way.

Such was the victory Thanasis had been hoping to pull off on his trip to Sicily
.
Though much of the work on sea bass taming had been done prior to his trip, the industry had yet to take off, and here, Thanasis thought, was his opening. He set about raising his 2,153 fish in a manner that would maximize their survival.

Early on, though, he encountered a problem he couldn’t seem to solve. After the first breeding of the initial tribe of fish, nearly 50 percent emerged with crooked backbones
.
While the fish were perfectly edible, they were unappealing, especially in a culture that prefers to have its fish served whole. In fact, the weird shape of these first cultured marine fish was to give rise to fallacious speculation throughout Europe that fish were being genetically engineered. It was a serious problem, and Frentzos applied his small staff to solving it as quickly as possible. “We couldn’t figure out why it was happening,” Frentzos recalled. “Is it cancer?” he wondered. It got to the point where desperate ideas were being thrown out. “I know,” Thanasis ventured at one point, “the fish don’t have enough vitamin C!”

Indeed, besides breeding, nutrition had been the next biggest bottleneck in taming sea bass. When they emerge from their eggs, the lack of a significant yolk sac makes them extremely vulnerable. They must immediately find something to hunt. But because they are so underdeveloped, lacking functioning eyes and equipped only with rudimentary nostrils, the only way they can locate prey is by using their neuron-rich lateral lines to sense the vibrations prey creates when it moves. In nature, sea bass are born right after the hatch of phytoplankton, microscopic algae that in turn act as fodder for tiny animals called zooplankton. The zooplankton wriggle with vigor during the halcyon days, luring sea bass to hunt them down.

The logical thing for fish farmers to have done would have been to grow zooplankton in captivity. But in some ways, zooplankton is as difficult to domesticate as sea bass. Eventually a different creature was found that could in effect merge the phytoplankton and zooplankton food chain into a single link. This class of creature was the freshwater animal called the rotifer. Initially considered a nuisance species that plagued Chinese carp growers, fouling their ponds and circulation systems, rotifers were at first merely skimmed off the surface of the water and discarded. But eventually early fish farmers in Japan (another nation with extreme food-security concerns) realized that they could be used to feed very small juvenile fish.

It was in France and Holland that the rotifer was perfected as early sea bass food. Pascal Divanach is a merry Frenchman hailing from Brittany who now makes his home on the island of Crete in Greece. Divanach descends from an old family deeply connected to the seafood industry. His brother has grown wealthy feeding fish to Europeans through the Clemon Accord Group, a seafood restaurant chain that is renowned throughout France. But it was Pascal and his fellow aquaculture researchers in France and Holland who figured out how to feed the fish that now feeds many Europeans.

Divanach was invited to the Greek Institute of Oceanography in the 1980s and married a Greek woman soon after. Still proudly French, he delights in his adopted country and has a personal sense of pride in the Greek fish-farming industry. While seated in his office outside the town of Iráklion, he held up a promotional sticker for Greek aquaculture that said, FISH OF GREECE, FISH OF THE SUN. “It’s very beautiful, don’t you think?” He went on to explain to me what the French contributed to the taming of the sea bass.

“The big advancement for sea bass culture was something we call the green-water effect,” Divanach told me. “In early systems they would introduce the rotifers and let them bloom. Because it was a closed system, bacteria would accumulate after twenty days and spread to the juvenile sea bass. In France we opened the system slightly. For one month the system was open to the sea to allow the refreshment of the environment with phytoplankton. This led to more food for the rotifers and better health and nutrition.”