By the 1980s, tuna fisheries on both sides of the Atlantic had come to be dominated by Japanese buyers, who prized the rich belly meat known as toro. Early hominids harvested tuna that orcas chased onto European beaches Greeks and Phoenicians depicted them on currency Spaniards funneled them into labyrinthine traps near the Strait of Gibraltar and 20th-century sportfishermen hooked them off North America’s eastern seaboard. Her book isn’t just an ode to bluefin - it’s about humankind’s obsession with them, a fixation as old as our species. “To stand beside a just-landed giant bluefin, still slick from salt water, feels akin to standing beside a natural marvel like Niagara Falls or an erupting volcano,” writes Pinchin, a Nova Scotia-based science journalist. Pinchin excels at evoking her piscine subjects, whose sickle-shaped tails beat nearly as fast as a hummingbird’s wing. Bluefin are extraordinary organisms: warm-blooded, keen-eyed, coated in pigment-producing cells that flash a rainbow of colors when the fish are hauled onto a boat. Pinchin’s eponymous kings are Atlantic bluefin tuna, marine predators that can weigh well over a thousand pounds - “imagine a grand piano shaped like a nuclear weapon,” as Pinchin puts it. Add it up, and it’s hard not to conclude that, as Karen Pinchin puts it in her riveting debut book, “ Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas,” fisheries science is “an impossible, thankless job with no easy answers.”īOOK REVIEW - “Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas,” by Karen Pinchin (Dutton, 320 pages).

And catch limits are set by councils beholden to the very industry they’re supposed to regulate. Illegal fishing runs rampant, making it hard to know how many fish are being pulled from the sea. The on-board observers who collect critical data sometimes face harassment and even, allegedly, murder by the crews they monitor. The point is clear: Few natural resources so confound measurement, let alone management, as fish.įisheries biology is an inherently challenging science that’s made even more difficult by its tense relationship with commercial fishing. Counting fish, the saying goes, is not unlike counting trees - if the trees constantly moved around the forest, and also you had to somehow tally them blindfolded. S pend enough time in the world of fisheries science, and you’re likely to hear an adage, coined by a researcher named John Shepherd, that neatly encapsulates the field’s uncertainty.

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