It was the idea of enrichment that led researchers to a vital discovery. Nutritionists knew that juvenile sea bass needed fats and proteins in their early diet. But if those fats and proteins were simply dumped into the water, juvenile sea bass would never be able to find them. It was the realization that a rotifer could be a perfect delivery system that proved critical. The very act of vibrating makes rotifers suitable “prey” for sea bass, compelling the sea bass to “hunt” and therefore acquire the fats and proteins that the rotifers contain. The final positive trait of rotifers is a rather strange quirk that makes them particularly useful to juvenile fish: rotifers possess an enzyme that causes them to literally digest themselves after death. This means that young sea bass, which early in life lack a full profile of digestive enzymes, can immediately get access to the nutrition contained within their miniature prey
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But rotifers were only the first phase of the solution. Once juvenile sea bass were over a few millimeters, they were still not quite ready for industrial feed pellets but were too large for rotifers to sustain them. A second transitional feed had to be used. And the one the international fish-farming community eventually settled on was one that, curiously, was more known to devotees of comic books than to readers of scientific journals.
Throughout the world, in the otherwise barren salt-lake ecosystems that occur in low-lying inland zones, a genus of tiny shrimp called artemia thrives. Because of the supersaline conditions of salt lakes, artemia produce hard, nearly impervious cysts that are fantastically tolerant to outside conditions. Artemia cysts over a million years old have been found and successfully hatched. The largest source of artemia in the world is the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and before marine aquaculture took off, there was an idiosyncratic mail-order marketer named Harold von Braunhut who popularized them.
Von Braunhut was a man of many weird talents. He raced motorcycles under the name “The Green Hornet” and managed a showman whose act consisted of diving forty feet into a children’s wading pool filled with a foot of water. Originally of Jewish origin, he became a neo-Nazi and also invented X-Ray Specs—those red-threaded glasses that gave the wearer the impression of seeing through people’s skin into their internal organs. But von Braunhut’s most successful discovery was artemia. Since artemia eggs are so resistant to exterior conditions, von Braunhut reasoned they could easily be put in mail-order envelopes and sent around the world. All that was needed was a marketing name to make them attractive to consumers. He marketed them first in 1960 as “Instant Life” but in 1964 settled upon the name “Sea-Monkeys.” Von Braunhut invented a whole parallel universe for these creatures—swings, playpens, life histories—all advertised on the backs of comic books. The hardy cysts could be mailed to eager nine-year-olds and would arrive ready to hatch in almost any water condition.
But European researchers realized that the best trick artemia could do was feed sea bass. The fact that they can be stored for years and then hatched at a predictable time makes artemia the ideal transitional feed for marine perciforms. Today the demand for artemia cysts is so great that overharvesting of them is now a major threat to the Great Salt Lake. One fish farmer I spoke with angrily compared the few nations who control the world’s artemia supply to OPEC. In the last ten years, the price of artemia cysts has risen exponentially.
Both rotifers and artemia, though, have one quality that was causing Thanasis Frentzos’s fish to be deformed. When they are enriched, they are literally overflowing with nutritious oils—oils that seep out of the animals’ membranes and float to the surface of an aquaculture tank. Eventually Thanasis and his colleagues realized that it was these oils that were somehow interfering with the development of that key perciform organ the swim bladder. When the young fish were anesthetized for analysis, it was found that a good number of them simply sank to the bottom. Something was happening that wasn’t allowing the fish to correctly form their flotation devices.
“We realized by carefully watching their behavior,” Frentzos told me, that “at thirteen or fourteen days old, the fish would swim to the surface. And it was here that they would sip a tiny bubble of air. When the fish are this young, the connection between their mouths and their swim bladders is still open, and so they can put air into their swim bladder—the air bubble is what forms the swim bladder in the first place. But what was happening was that in the feeding environment we had created, the fish couldn’t get to the surface. The oil from the feed was floating on the surface, preventing them from taking that first sip of air. And so we found that if we skimmed the oil off the top of the water, we would clear the way for them. Then they could take in their air properly before it was too late and they physiologically closed the barrier to the swim bladder.”
All these developments would lead to greater and greater survival in the rearing of sea bass. Whereas in nature the survival of young was about one one-hundredth of a percent, by the time Frentzos had perfected his tank innovations, survival had risen to about 20 percent—a ten-thousand-fold improvement. And it was with these improvements that he was then able to make use of a uniquely Greek feature—the natural sea bass habitats of the Ionian Sea.
While France does have a relatively long coastline, environmentalists’ resistance to near-shore fish farming combined with real-estate speculation meant that very few coastal sites were available for farming. Greece, on the other hand, is a natural for marine aquaculture. While Greece is ninety-sixth in the world in terms of overall land area, its shores are so intensely crimped and undulating that it is tenth in the world in total length of coast. No point on the mainland is farther than a hundred kilometers from the water, which means that fish grown near the shore can be easily and quickly shipped to major population centers.
Lastly, and perhaps most critically, because of the high degree of crenellation in its coast, Greece is endowed with bays and harbors with extremely low “fetch.” Fetch is a nautical term meaning the distance over which wind-driven waves travel without encountering obstructions. The longer the fetch, the more powerful the waves, and the more powerful the waves, the more likely they are to destroy net cages suspended in the sea. Greece’s thousands of bays are fetchproof wonders—surrounded by abruptly high mountains. Because fetch is for most intents and purposes not an issue, the Greeks could construct fish cages out of flimsy, found material at low cost. When marine aquaculture began, there were no advanced engineering schemes for building in-water fish cages, and they came up with the simplest solution; as one Greek aquaculture scientist put it, “Four floating blue barrels nailed together with planks, with a net hanging below.”
And so it was in Greece that all the different elements came together. The very considerable problems of breeding, juvenile feed, and habitat had been overcome. The stage was set for the sea bass to go global.
T
he sea around Cephalonia is still largely empty of fish, and the fishermen who ply the waters live more off a 150-europer-day subsidy than off any of the fish they catch. But thanks to Frentzos, many of the bays and inlets have net cages hanging in them today, filled to the brim with sea bass. The first crops grew out successfully, so successfully that local restaurants during tourist season were pestering Frentzos constantly for fish. “It got to the point where I had to hide the fish from others. They all wanted my fish!”
Word of Frentzos’s success spread. Some of his staff were poached by other companies. And soon there was a Greek sea bass gold rush going on. Large sea bass-farming companies emerged that became publicly traded behemoths. So new was it all that the Greek government itself turned to Frentzos, who, while only slightly ahead of his colleagues, was asked to help set regulations on farming sea bass in the Mediterranean. “Once one of the farmers nearby came to me,” Frentzos recalled, “and he asked me, ‘Thanasis, can you please tell these people that the walkway between my cages is wide enough? It’s sixty-eight centimeters and they’re telling me it has to be seventy-five centimeters. And when I asked why, they said it’s because you, Thanasis, have a walkway of seventy-five centimeters!’ ”
The other problem that stemmed from the sea bass boom was disease and pollution. Unaware of how to control disease proliferation in fish, newcomers to fish farming were overwhelmed by a bacterial infection called vibriosis. Frentzos was one of the only farmers who had proper training in marine biology and was more or less spared. He sited his farms in places with strong moving currents and maintained a carefully sterile environment. One farmer, thinking that Thanasis had some hidden knowledge that he could access, asked him for help. “I told him everything he had to do, but he wouldn’t listen,” Frentzos recalls, laughing. “He didn’t do any of it. Eventually he hired a witch to remove the evil eye from his farm. Believe me, I understand the evil eye. Sometimes you feel it, watching you like the cat watches the mouse. But in this case it wasn’t the evil eye. And this man, he went out of business.”
But, like the French and the Israelis before him, Thanasis watched the market slip away from himself, too. During the ensuing years of the sea bass boom, being a good fish farmer with sound practices wasn’t always the thing that made you successful. Greece, as one of the poorer nations to achieve European Union membership, had access to huge amounts of “cohesion funds” meant to bring struggling economies into parity with stronger nations like Germany. In Greece a large portion of those cohesion funds went to the farming of European sea bass. Again, the goal was not to help Greece produce a sustainable product—rather, it was to help Greece make money and enter the European economic zone with as little pain as possible. Less sound farmers than Thanasis could mask their bad practices when they occurred by just throwing more EU money at any problem that came their way. The most opportunistic of these Greek companies used EU money to build sea bass empires that have spread outside their borders. From a place of extreme scarcity, where sea bass were a dwindling source of wild marine protein, they have grown markedly every year in their farmed form. Today Greece sends nearly a hundred million of those exactly plate-size fish to diners throughout Europe, the United States, and beyond every single year.
Sea bass booms and busts now wash over the shores of the Mediterranean, rising and falling as profit margins get thinner and operations move to areas with weaker regulation and cheaper labor costs. From Turkey to Tunisia to Egypt they spread, and each time, as with the salmon industry in Canada and Norway, the same bad practices cause pollution, disease, and death. On each such occasion, emergency regulations are put in place to save the industry and the coast. Once upon a time, when sea bass were still rare, there was a profit margin of ten dollars per pound. Now that global production of sea bass approaches 200 million fish a year, the profit margin is down to half a cent per kilo
.
The economics will only get worse. Feed costs are surging, and prices for sea bass are collapsing. The reputation of the European sea bass itself is also suffering. “I think both chefs and diners alike view it as a utilitarian fish,” Jay Rayner, the food critic at the UK newspaper the
Observer,
wrote to me. “It stands up well to almost any accompaniment without over-dominating the plate.” The holiday fish that was once a centerpiece of ancient Romans has become a day laborer that works to compete with side dishes. And the wages are not good. This makes Thanasis pull at his long white hair, wondering whether it makes sense to continue this strange adventure that he began in 1982. The world needs food, he insists, and the people who are hiking up costs on him are not thinking wisely about the future.
“When these accountants from these companies call me and tell me they are raising their prices on me again, I look forward to the day when they will have nothing to eat. That will be some kind of day. And you know what I’ll say at that point? I’ll say, ‘Eat your computer. Eat it. Eat it right now.’ ”
S
ocrates,” I asked, “how do you tell a wild sea bass from a farmed sea bass?” I was at a restaurant northeast of Athens with representatives of Selonda, the second-largest sea bass farmer in Greece. A grilled, whole European sea bass lay on a plate before us. Socrates Panopoulos, a hatchery manager of the Greek-owned company, let his junior scientists answer first.
“The liver,” one biologist proposed. “If the liver is dark red, it means the fish is eating a low-fat diet and is probably wild.”
“But, Kostas,” Socrates replied, “they have taken out the guts. What are we to do?”
“Maybe the otolith?” another scientist suggested.
“Ah,” said Socrates, “the otolith.”
He worked a knife into the fish’s head and removed the pearly ear bone. Then, using his glass as a primitive magnifier, he counted the otolith’s layers, which accrue like rings in a tree. “I see four,” Socrates said, “and they are uneven. This fish is four years old and wild.”
I had purchased this wild sea bass, to test the Selonda scientists’ know-how, at the Central Fish Market of Athens, where one can still find a separate display for “wild” sea bass and where such wild fish sell at three to five times the price of their farmed equivalents. Whereas there was no such thing as a farmed sea bass forty years ago, today there are nearly ten times as many sea bass grown as caught. Around 180 million pounds of farmed sea bass are put on ice yearly, compared to just under 10 million pounds of wild fish. But as Yonathan Zohar pointed out to me on my return from Greece, even the supposedly wild fish may be radically less wild than they were half a century ago.
“There is no doubt in my mind,” Zohar wrote me from his lab in Baltimore, “that the so-called wild sea bass are escapees from the cages. We can confirm this via DNA tests.” Whereas three genetically distinct populations of sea bass once inhabited the Mediterranean—an Eastern, Western, and an Atlantic stock—now the Western stock, developed primarily by the French, probably predominates, even outside fish farms. “Fish of Greece, Fish of the Sun” may be the motto under which Greek sea bass are sold to the world, but these fish are, genetically anyway, fish of France.