Mark: Michelle, I'll give you two options: a brand-new luxury sedan, or one fish. Which do you take? Michelle: The car, obviously. What kind of question is that? I can’t drive a fish to work. Mark: Wrong answer. In Tokyo's fish market, a single bluefin tuna has sold for over $3 million. That's not just a fish; it's an obsession, a commodity, and an ecological crisis all rolled into one. Michelle: Three million dollars? For one fish? Okay, I'm listening. That’s completely insane. Mark: And that's the world we're diving into today with Karen Pinchin's incredible, award-winning book, Kings of Their Own Ocean. It’s a story that has it all: science, history, obsession, and the future of our planet. Michelle: What's amazing is that Pinchin isn't just a science journalist; she's also a trained chef. It gives her this unique lens on the tuna, seeing it as both a magnificent creature and a global commodity on a plate. Mark: Exactly. And her story starts not with the market, but with the fish itself—a biological marvel that’s been swimming our oceans for millions of years. Before it's a commodity, it's a king. This fish is basically a torpedo with gills.

Michelle: A torpedo with gills, I like that. What makes it so special compared to, say, a cod or a salmon? Mark: Well, for starters, the Atlantic bluefin is warm-blooded. It’s an endotherm, which is incredibly rare for a fish. It has a specialized circulatory system, a web of veins and arteries called the 'rete mirabile'—the 'wonderful net'—that acts as a heat exchanger. Michelle: Wait, warm-blooded? Like a mammal? So it’s generating its own heat? Mark: Precisely. It can keep its core body temperature, its muscles, and even its brain significantly warmer than the surrounding water. This allows it to be an explosive, powerful predator in frigid Atlantic waters where other fish would be sluggish. The book quotes Jacques Cousteau, who swam with a school of them and described them as having the "seeming momentum of locomotives." They are just pure power. Michelle: That’s incredible. It’s like a high-performance engine of the sea. Mark: It is. And their life story is just as epic. The book follows a specific tuna named Amelia. She starts as a tiny egg in the Mediterranean, one of 30 million released by her mother. The odds of survival are staggering. Only about two of those 30 million eggs will ever make it to adulthood. Michelle: Two out of thirty million? That’s a rounding error. How does anything survive that? Mark: By being a relentless eating machine from day one. The book describes how, as a larva, if food is scarce, Amelia would resort to cannibalism, eating her smaller siblings just to survive. Then, once she’s big enough, she joins the great migration, an ancient journey programmed into her DNA, swimming thousands of kilometers across the entire Atlantic to the feeding grounds off North America. Michelle: So this fish is a biological miracle, a super-predator that crosses oceans. It really does sound like a king of its own ocean. Mark: It is. And for millennia, humans have been utterly captivated by it. Which brings us to our own complicated role in this story.

Michelle: Okay, so we have this incredible, almost indestructible creature. How on earth did we get so good at catching it? Mark: For a long time, we weren't. The book details these ancient, massive trap systems in Spain called the almadraba. They’re essentially underwater mazes of nets, set up for centuries in the same spots, that exploit the tuna's natural instinct to swim in circles when it hits a barrier. It was a huge, community-wide effort. But even that was a regional practice. Michelle: So what changed? What took it from a local tradition to a global phenomenon? Mark: Two things, really. First, sport. In the 1930s, wealthy adventurers like Michael Lerner descended on a tiny Nova Scotia town called Wedgeport. They turned catching these "giants" on a rod and reel into the ultimate test of machismo. The book describes it as the "Age of Giants," where a town's entire economy was transformed by this new form of trophy hunting. Michelle: Right, the thrill of the chase. But that still sounds like a niche sport. How did it become a multi-million dollar industry? Mark: That’s the wild part. It was a logistics problem. In the early 1970s, Japan Airlines had a dilemma: their cargo planes were flying to North America full but returning to Tokyo nearly empty. An employee, Akira Okazaki, was tasked with finding something to fill them. He heard about these giant, undervalued tuna off Canada's east coast. Michelle: And let me guess, he put two and two together. Mark: Exactly. The book tells this amazing story of how they partnered with a local Canadian businessman who, in turn, hired the town's coffin-makers to build insulated, ice-filled boxes to ship the tuna. They flew the first ones to Tokyo, and they sold for an astronomical price. The "day of the flying fish" was born. Michelle: So it went from a local nuisance to a global luxury almost overnight, just because of an airline's logistics problem? And it was shipped in coffins? That's incredible. Mark: It created a gold rush. And it wasn't just JAL. The book gets into the Unification Church, led by Sun Myung Moon, who had a passion for fishing. They moved into fishing towns like Gloucester, Massachusetts, and started buying up boats and processing plants, using their followers as labor and strategically driving up prices to corner the market. Michelle: Wow. So you have this collision of sport, big business, and even religion, all focused on this one fish. That sounds like a recipe for disaster. Mark: It was a collision course. And that's where the science and politics of it all get incredibly messy. The fate of the bluefin became less about the fish and more about the people fighting over it.

Michelle: Okay, so with all this money flooding in, someone must have realized this wasn't sustainable. Where were the scientists and the regulators? Mark: They were there, but they were caught in a political storm. This is where the fisherman Al Anderson, who tagged Amelia, becomes so important. He wasn't just a fisherman; he was a citizen scientist, meticulously tagging thousands of fish for a researcher named Frank Mather. They were trying to understand where these fish were going. Michelle: And what did they find? Mark: They found that the fish were crossing the Atlantic all the time. But this flew in the face of the official policy. In 1981, the international regulatory body, ICCAT, made a decision that the book calls a "convenient fiction." They drew an imaginary line down the middle of the Atlantic, at 45 degrees west longitude. Michelle: Hold on. They drew an imaginary line in the middle of the ocean and basically told the fish to stay on their side? And based policy on that for decades? Mark: For decades. They created a "western" stock and an "eastern" stock and managed them separately. The book reveals this was a political decision, not a scientific one. The US wanted to impose strict conservation in its waters, but European nations resisted. So, the US essentially said, "Fine, we'll pretend they're two different fish. We'll save 'our' fish, and you can do what you want with 'yours'." Michelle: That is absolutely wild. It’s like drawing a line in the sky and telling birds not to cross it. What happened when the science finally caught up? Mark: It created a firestorm. Years later, when Al Anderson's simple spaghetti tag on Amelia was found by a scientific team, and then her satellite tag showed her crossing the ocean, it was just more proof that the line was meaningless. But by then, the battle lines were drawn. You had environmentalists like Carl Safina, who the book portrays as a fierce advocate, pushing for a complete trade ban at CITES, the endangered species convention. Michelle: And I'm guessing the fishing industry wasn't thrilled about that. Mark: Not at all. The book describes a massive lobbying effort by Japan and other fishing nations. The CITES proposal failed. It became this "Kafkaesque" situation where you had scientists, some funded by the industry, arguing the stocks were fine, and others, like Safina, warning of imminent collapse. It was a war fought with data, politics, and money.

Mark: And that’s the real heart of Kings of Their Own Ocean. The story of the bluefin isn't just about one fish; it's a microcosm of our entire relationship with the planet's resources. It's about how human obsession, powered by technology and global markets, can outpace nature's ability to recover. Michelle: It’s a pretty bleak picture. So is there any hope? The book ends with the death of Amelia, but also the passing of Al Anderson, the man who started her journey. Mark: There is a glimmer of hope. The author, Pinchin, points out that in the years since, fisheries management has started to evolve. They're moving away from these politically-driven decisions and towards what are called "harvest strategies." It’s a more data-driven, science-first approach that sets rules in advance, taking some of the politics out of the yearly quota fights. Michelle: So, a system that's a little harder to game. Mark: Exactly. It's a slow, difficult process, but it shows that recovery is possible when the will is there. The book is critically acclaimed for this balanced view—it doesn't shy away from the greed and destruction, but it also celebrates the passionate individuals who dedicated their lives to understanding and saving this species. Michelle: It really makes you think about the seafood on your own plate, doesn't it? What's the hidden story behind it? The journey it took, the battles fought over it. It’s so much more than just a meal. Mark: It is. It’s a story of science, obsession, and our own reflection in the water. This is Aibrary, signing off.