Kings of Their Own Ocean

Informationen zum Autor Karen Pinchin is an award-winning investigative journalist and culinary school graduate. A recent Tow Fellow at PBS's Frontline , she graduated from Columbia Journalism School with a Master of Arts in science journalism and has since been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Sloan Foundation. Her work has appeared in Scientific American , Canadian Geographic , Hakai Magazine , The Globe and Mail , and The Walrus , among other outlets . She lives, writes, and fishes in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her husband, son, and a tankful of guppies. Klappentext "In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and tagged one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England's coast. Fourteen years later that same fish -- dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys -- was caught again, this time in a Mediterranean fish trap. Over his fishing career, Al marked more than sixty thousand fish with plastic tags, an obsession that made him nearly as many enemies as it did friends. His quest landed him in the crossfire of an ongoing fight between a booming bluefin tuna industry and desperate conservation efforts, a conflict that is once again heating up as overfishing and climate change threaten the fish's fate. Kings of Their Own Ocean is an urgent investigation that combines science, business, crime, and environmental justice. Through Karen Pinchin's exclusive interviews and access, interdisciplinary approach, and mesmerizing storytelling, readers join her on boats and docks as she visits tuna hot spots and scientists from Portugal to Japan, New Jersey to Nova Scotia, and glimpse, as Pinchin does, rays of dazzling hope for the future of our oceans"-- Leseprobe Chapter One Hooked Al and Amelia, Their Early Years Deep below the surface of Rhode Island Sound on September 27, 2004, a bristling school of Atlantic bluefin tuna sliced above an inky-blue landscape of sandy sea bottom and glacier-sheared boulders. Brothers swam beside sisters, alongside cousins and distant cousins. They were all only a year or two old, but in the depths off Block Island they were already feared. The warm-blooded species has a voracious appetite, and the juvenile fish ate nearly everything they came across-shrimp, deep-water squid, jellyfish-near constantly, and in constant motion, since bluefin must swim to breathe. Their eyes, the sharpest of all the bony fishes', perceived filtered light from the surface as it dimmed and brightened around them, each night and day like those before. Within the school, one half-meter-long female fish coasted, her pectoral fins splayed like airplane wings that helped her glide and tweak the power generated by her sickled tail. She had small, chartreuse-yellow triangular points running along the top and bottom of her back and belly in matching rows of prehistoric finlets. Her torpedo-shaped head was smooth, interrupted only by the downward-curved gash of her mouth and dark eyes. She was one of many, and during her lifetime she would be nicknamed Amelia by a scientist named Molly Lutcavage. Many months earlier, back when she had hatched and grown into a three-millimeter-long larval fish, Amelia's eyes opened on the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Bluefin tuna spawn only when water reaches between 20 and 29 degrees Celsius. When they do, they breed in the dead of night, between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., producing milky clouds of millions of eggs and sperm that drift five meters below the ocean's surface. Once fertilized, each egg measures about a millimeter across and will float on balmy currents for one to three days. Amelia's first meal after hatching was an oil droplet contained in her own yolk sac. Her tiny body quickly developed huge black eyes and a digestive system, including a disproportionately large, hinged jaw with a toothsome underbite. Over the next two weeks she ...

Autorentext

Karen Pinchin is an award-winning investigative journalist and culinary school graduate. A recent Tow Fellow at PBS's Frontline, she graduated from Columbia Journalism School with a Master of Arts in science journalism and has since been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Sloan Foundation. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Canadian Geographic, Hakai Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and The Walrus, among other outlets. She lives, writes, and fishes in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her husband, son, and a tankful of guppies.

Klappentext

This is a tale of human obsession, one intrepid tuna, the dedicated fisherman who caught and set her free, the promises and limits of ocean science, and the big truth of how our insatiable appetite for bluefin transformed a cottage industry into a global dilemma.
 
In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and marked one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England’s coast with a plastic fish tag. Fourteen years later that fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—died in a Mediterranean fish trap, sparking Karen Pinchin’s riveting investigation into the marvels, struggles, and prehistoric legacy of this remarkable species.
 
Over his fishing career Al marked more than sixty thousand fish with plastic tags, an obsession that made him nearly as many enemies as it did friends. His quest landed him in the crossfire of an ongoing fight between a booming bluefin tuna industry and desperate conservation efforts, a conflict that is once again heating up as overfishing and climate change threaten the fish’s fate.

Kings of Their Own Ocean is an urgent investigation that combines science, business, crime, and environmental justice. As Pinchin writes, “as a global community, we are collectively only ever a few terrible choices away from wiping out any ocean species.” Through her exclusive access and interdisciplinary, mesmerizing lens, readers will join her on boats and docks as she visits tuna hot spots and scientists from Portugal to Japan, New Jersey to Nova Scotia, and glimpse, as the author does, rays of dazzling hope for the future of our oceans.

Zusammenfassung
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Winner of the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, the Axiom Book Awards Gold Medal for Business History, and the 2024 Taste Canada Culinary Narrative Award

Shortlisted for the 2024 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Taste Canada Award for Culinary Narrative

This is a tale of human obsession, one intrepid tuna, the dedicated fisherman who caught and set her free, the promises and limits of ocean science, and the big truth of how our insatiable appetite for bluefin transformed a cottage industry into a global dilemma.**

In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and marked one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England’s coast with a plastic fish tag. Fourteen years later that fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—died in a Mediterranean fish trap, sparking Karen Pinchin’s riveting investigation into the marvels, struggles, and prehistoric legacy of this remarkable species.

Over his fishing career Al marked more than sixty thousand fish with plastic tags, an obsession that made him nearly as many enemies as it did friends. His quest landed him in the crossfire of an ongoing fight between a booming bluefin tuna industry and desperate conservation efforts, a conflict that is once again heating up as overfishing and climate change threaten the fish’s fate.

Kings of Their Own Ocean is an urgent investigation that combines science, business, crime, and environmental justice. As Pinchin writes, “as a global community, we are collectively only ever a few terrible choices away from wiping out any ocean species.” Through her exclusive access and interdisciplinary, mesmerizing lens, readers will join…