Book kings of own ocean tuna obsession and the future of our seas. Karen pinchin is an Award Winning investigator of journalist and Culinary School graduate, a recent tao fellow at pbs frontline. She graduated from Columbia 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