By Scott Graber
It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve got Seattle’s Best coffee. I’ve also got the October 16, 2023, issue of The New Yorker which brings news of squid fishing in the Pacific Ocean. Jan Urbina’s piece documents an enormous Chinese fishing fleet and its efficient, seaborne effort to remove every squid from that ocean. Her piece is lengthy, involving North Korea, Ecuador and West Africa, but it seems we Americans are also complicit.
Urbina says squid stocks were robust until 1974 when Paul Kalikstein published his masters thesis saying that Americans would eat this strange-looking protein if it was breaded and fried. “Promoters suggested calling it ‘Calamari;’ the Italian word made it sound more like a gourmet dish.”
Apparently the Chinese read this thesis, deciding to build a fleet of ocean-going trawlers that would eventually employ thousands of Indonesian men who would do the hard, heavy, unhappy lifting. These trawlers — now numbering 266 in the Galapagos alone — use these hapless Indonesians together with sophisticated techniques to reel these creatures to the surface.
Now every bar and tavern in the United States serves ‘Calamari’ — along with loaded nachos, fried cheese and fried green tomatoes. These days bar-hopping, beer-drinking Americans are eating their way — with an Aioli-sauced assist — through the squid fishery. “Today Americans eat a hundred thousand tons a year.”
Yes. We are part of the problem.
All of this was on my mind the other night as I sat in the vast, just-finished pavilion at the Port Royal Sound Foundation’s headquarters in Okatie. This was it’s “Night on the Sound” fundraiser and this event always comes with a speaker — usually a marine scientist. This year it was Robert Hueter, Ph.D.
Hueter is a youngish, open-collared, Towson-raised scientist who spends most of his time aboard an industrial-looking ship called the M/V Ocearch. In this connection, Hueter catches, examines and tags Great White sharks from Nova Scotia to the Gulf of Mexico. “Tagging” means attaching a transmitter that gives Hueter and his crew members the ability to follow individual sharks wherever they swim.
As Hueter took us through his images — Jimmy Buffett’s lyrics playing in the background — he told stories of individual sharks; sharks he had named; “Some of them have poked their noses into Port Royal Sound.” If you pull up the interactive maps at the Ocearch website you can get a good idea of when Caroline, Andromache, Rose and Cabot passed by Beaufort County on their swims up and down the Atlantic Coast.
When Heuter is not winching Whites aboard the M/V Ocearch, he is writing papers. These include studies about the vertical movements (of sharks) and the metal contaminants that collect in their bodies. He has, in fact, written 180 papers about the species.
Although consumers have decimated the squid, swordfish, bluefin tuna and cod fisheries, Hueter says the Great White population is doing well—at least the population right off our Coast.
But Jan Urbina writes, “More than 30 countries, including China, have banned shark finning, but the practice persists. Chinese ships often catch hammerhead, oceanic whitetips, and blue sharks so that their fins can be used in shark-fin soup. In 2017, Ecuadorian authorities discovered at least six thousand illegally caught sharks on board a single reefer.”
The Chinese also go after the totoaba — “A large fish whose swim bladder is highly prized in Chinese medicine.” In addition, they have the world’s largest fleet of bottom trawlers which are busy leveling coral reefs that store huge quantities of carbon dioxide.
China launched its long-distance fishing fleet in 1985, sending 13 trawlers to Guinea-Bissau. Since then it has invested billions of dollars in its overseas fleet, catching more than five billion pounds of seafood every year — the biggest portion being squid. Today China consumes more than one third of the world’s fish.
The Chinese are unapologetic and largely unresponsive to criticism, practicing a philosophy called political capitalism. While they still call themselves Communist, they have abandoned Karl Marx and base their legitimacy on economic prosperity and social stability. And a part of that prosperity is based on its subsidized seafood industry.
“The case for China’s system rests on the assumption that a one-party state gets things done, while Western liberal democracies are mired in dissension,” says the Wall Street Journal.
But right now moment there are serious problems with their economy — and the Chinese must now wonder about their single-party, no-dissent-allowed system.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
