What a Fish Goes Through Before we get Him

[paul b]

I just finished having breakfast with my wife. I made her egg whites and I had steel cut oatmeal, but who cares. I was thinking about what our fish goes through before we get them. It goes something like this:

 

 

 

 

The fish, lets say it's a copperband butterfly is swimming around the reef, minding his own business perhaps raising his dorsal fin occasionally if he sees a cute Babe Copperband who looks single. He is sticking his snout in crevices looking for worms for breakfast while also scanning the sea scape for moray eels, groupers, sharks and anything else that would eat him, when all of a sudden he finds himself in a net. He never saw a net and doesn't know what to make of it. He is lifted out of the water, sees the bright sun and is in a place he has never seen. He gasps for breath and tries to swim away but his tail doesn't seem to work. Then he is thrown into a small bucket with 6 or 7 other fish, some of which he doesn't even like.

 

After a noisy ride in a boat he arrives at a beach where some of his fellow fish are not feeling to well so they are thrown on to the sand. But he is thrown into a larger bucket and gets a ride in a rusty Oldsmobile station wagon to a holding facility with concrete tanks where he is deposited with many more fish.

 

 

 

 

He realizes he is hungry but there is nothing to eat, he also realizes he is scared, but there is no place to hide.

 

The next day he is again netted and put into a plastic bag which he thinks is the belly of a jellyfish having never seen a plastic bag. Something is added to the bag to make him "woozy", maybe LSD.

 

Now he is really terrified and he shows his fear by turning a dark gray to mute his beautiful yellow stripes.

 

He doesn't know it but now he is in the hold of a commercial air liner where he will stay for an entire day. His captors didn't pay for extra leg room either.

 

Eventually it gets very bright and someone cuts open the bag he is in with a razor blade and dumps him into a dark, Tupperware container that has 2" of water in it and 30 other, different fish that he never met. The water is too shallow for him to even "stand" upright. A tiny hose is dripping odd tasting water into this tub and he is starting to wake up and become more terrified.

 

Now he is netted and put into a small glass tank.

 

He has never encountered glass and tries to swim through it. He keeps bumping his delicate snout on the glass and can't figure out why this "water" is so hard. He realizes he is stuck.

 

His lateral line keeps telling him there is something surrounding him, but he can't see it.

 

All of a sudden there are strange particles in the water, weird looking flakes and pellets along with tiny dead shrimp which he has never seen before. He is now really hungry but can't find anything that looks like the food he has been eating every day of his life.

 

OMG, he realizes he must have died and went to the "other "place besides heaven.

 

 

 

 

But, No!

 

He is in a store, an LFS, whatever that is, marked $39.99.

 

 

 

 

Humans constantly walk by on their silly legs ogling at him and tapping the glass.

 

A net comes in and chases him around until it traps him against the glass and lifts him out, he again gasps for water as he did before and he really hates when that happens.

 

Now he is put into the smallest place he has ever been in and it gets very dark.

 

He is running out of oxygen and he can't move more than a few inches. He is more terrified than he has ever been.

 

 

 

 

He is thinking he is going to be chopped up with onions, doused with olive oil, stuffed into a small can labeled "Dolphin Safe" and put on a shelf in the canned food aisle of "Super Stop and Shop".

 

 

 

 

The light returns and a human hand plunges into the bag and takes him out, he knows he will be eaten any second and wishes he could close his eyes, then he realizes, he has no eye lids.

 

Now he is in a tiny container and it has an irritating blue chemical in it that he doesn't recognize.

 

After an hour of torture he is placed into a larger, but still tiny tank with that same chemical.

 

Again some particles are added to his jail cell.

 

 

 

 

Now if this copperband was going into my tank, he would be released into a natural tank with plenty of hiding places and in a day or so of getting comfortable, eating food he recognizes he would make friends with the other fish and he would go on to live 10 or 15 years of heavenly bliss.

 

 

 

 

If he is going to some one who quarantines, he will go into a bare tank with plumbing elbows and little else but a bright light.

 

He will stay there for 72 days all the while saying Jesus, Mary and Josephine, what the heck did I ever do to deserve this!

 

Will this ever end!.

 

 

 

 

After the 72 days, he goes into a tank and tries to go about his business without getting into trouble because he doesn't want to be punished any more.

 

 

 

 

[Origami]

This reminds me of Matt Pederson talking to us about the chain of custody of a wild-caught fish. You missed the trip to the local puddle-jumper airport an hour or two away in the tropics, and the stop-and-go at the wholesaler in LA. It's a rough ride and we wonder sometimes why they're so vulnerable to disease and aggression.

 

The chain is a lot less taxing and mortality rates are often a lot lower for captive-bred fish.

 

You've just made a commercial for why we should support captive breeding efforts.

[paul b]

Good Morning Tom. I have seen them collect fish in the tropics with cages. The ones I saw were for food. They would dump a net with maybe fifty pounds of fish on the sand. Lookdowns, tangs, moray eels etc. They would sell them for 50 cents a pound and in a few hours throw the rest of the dead fish into the water.

[MisterTang]

Good Morning Tom. I have seen them collect fish in the tropics with cages. The ones I saw were for food. They would dump a net with maybe fifty pounds of fish on the sand. Lookdowns, tangs, moray eels etc. They would sell them for 50 cents a pound and in a few hours throw the rest of the dead fish into the water.

 

Paul, 

 

Did you see this occurring in any US-based operation? I have this this level of carelessness (and also using toxins to stun fish) in SE Asia, but had not heard of this happening in US waters.

[Origami]

Good Morning Tom. I have seen them collect fish in the tropics with cages. The ones I saw were for food. They would dump a net with maybe fifty pounds of fish on the sand. Lookdowns, tangs, moray eels etc. They would sell them for 50 cents a pound and in a few hours throw the rest of the dead fish into the water.

 

Good morning. Seems such a waste but that's probably how they make their living. My late uncle on my mom's side was a fisherman off Okinawa back in the 50s-70's. Food-grade fish back then. I don't suspect that he did much in the aquarium trade. Hard life for those guys. He died young; in his mid-40's.

 

I hope that you're shoulder's doing better these days. And that Dale is holding her own. The weather's cool today but I'll bet you're looking forward to some time on your boat and doing some pod-netting as well.

[paul b]

Mr Tang, that was in Saint Lucia and Tom is correct, that's how people make a living. Most of the resident people just go fishing for their meals and if they don't catch anything, their family don't eat.
We are very spoiled in the US because we have supermarkets and no one is starving. Most of the world is not like that and If I was starving I would eat copperband butterflies, lookdowns, purple tangs, crickets, worms and even hamburger helper, whatever that is. 

Here in the US, tons of food is thrown out in restaurants if it is not sold in a certain period of time and fish markets can only sell fish up to a specific date, then it is thrown in the garbage.  A big waste but that's the way it is.

There is also a large percentage of food fish that never makes it to consumers because many fish get squashed or mutilated in the hold of the ship and they are unsellable.  They are fine but no one would buy them.

When I was a kid my Dad, who owned a fish market would take me to the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan.  Hugh ships would dock there and using a crane they would empty the hold of the ship right into the street.

Men would be standing there with big snow shovels shoveling the fish into wooden crates.  They would throw the "not perfect" fish into the harbor for the seagulls and rats.

My favorite then was sitting on immense sea turtles that were on the sidewalk on their backs still alive.  They were destined to be soup.

Edited May 8, 2017 by paul b