30 Days of OCEANS: Tierney Thys
Tierney Thys is one of the world’s experts on the Mola-mola, the giant ocean sunfish. But her love, understanding of, and curiosity about the importance of all fishes is boundless. An excerpt from her essay for our new book, OCEANS, The Threats to the Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide.
What is it about fish?
I’ve revered them ever since I met my first goldfish named Lucky. I was six years old and a member of my community swim team. Each year, the team hosted a crazy event marking the end of swim season. First, the coaches would purchase hundreds of unsuspecting goldfish. Next, they’d dump them into our heavily chlorinated community pool. Then they’d raise a starter’s gun and yell, “Swimmers to your marks! Get set! BANG!” The gun would fire and the screaming hordes, including me, would plunge into the pool to capture as many poor fish as we could with Ziploc baggies. After a few minutes, the novelty would wear off, and we’d haul ourselves out, having transformed the pool into a confetti broth of sparkling scales and belly-up bodies. It was during one of these insane events that I found Lucky.
The community center stopped this practice years ago. Too many fish died too quickly. If the chlorine didn’t get them, the rough handling did. But Lucky turned out to be rather hardy, living for many years in a little tank where I could watch his liquid-gold antics play out for hours. I’d daydream that I possessed his seamless swimming skills, and could breath underwater just like him.
Three decades later, standing before the Outer Bay tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I gaze at massive bluefin tuna. For most visitors, tuna simply exist as oily chunks of meat stuffed into a can or splayed atop white rice. Catching a full-bodied glimpse of these living, muscle-bound torpedoes makes for a breath-taking experience. Something almost sacred happens when you enter this area of the Aquarium. It’s dark, cozy with a quiet, planetary power. Even amidst hordes of other visitors, you can almost feel what it must be like to an element of the sea . . . to be a powerful, sleek fish.
Fish impress in myriad ways. In size range they span from fingernail size gobies to school-bus sized whale sharks. As masters of adaptation, they can live in nearly any body of water, be it scalding sulfurous vents or ice-bound polar seas. Their sex, spawning and parenting habits are unmatched; from being male and female simultaneously like surfperch; to giving birth to live young like great white sharks, to releasing 300 million eggs like ocean sunfish or even mouth-brooding like African cichlids. Evolutionarily, fish occupied Earth far longer that we have, sporting a history dating back to the dawn of complex animal life, half a billion years ago. From that first piscine Eve descended one bold fleshy-finned group that stepped onto land and transformed into sentient beings. These same beings would ultimately acquire the ability to scribble love notes, drag bottom trawlers, cinch up purse-seines, and witness once teeming seas drain of life.
At the Aquarium, I watch as my children press their hands and faces to the tank hoping not to miss a single tail beat. This tank thrums with activity, and if you didn’t know better, you could trick yourself into thinking it a perfect proxy for the wild ocean crashing just outside the walls. Here, every inch of blue is alive with big healthy life. Out there, in the concertina sea, the tune is different.
We’ve perpetrated oceanic felonies many times over, decimating so many big commercial fish stocks like Atlantic swordfish and bluefin tuna that even if we stopped all fishing today, populations would still take decades to rebuild, if ever. And with fewer fish, lower-energy organisms like jellies and bacteria can bloom in great numbers and gain strongholds on the sea. Not the most appetizing of scenarios.
As grim as it may seem, however, we are making some progress. According to renowned social anthropologist, Stephen Pinker, human society is growing increasingly pacifist, relying less on violence to solve our problems. We are starting to create stronger protocols for conducting non-human animal research and recognizing that fish do indeed feel pain. Steadily and measurably, we are extending our circle of compassion to the life in the sea.
In the big picture, caring for this life in the sea may in fact make us happier people. Positive psychologists argue that four distinct things contribute to deep happiness: 1) satisfying work; 2) being good at something, 3) spending time with people we like, and 4) having the chance to be a part of something. By making wise seafood choices; taking responsibility for our garbage including CO2 and by getting involved to make our voices heard, we can find satisfying work that we are all good at doing. In saving the fishes, we can all become part of something enormously important. And if we do it together, we will, by default, be spending time with people we like.
In my case, that means spending time with my family. Back at the Aquarium, my four-year old daughter turns to me and with those big sea-green eyes of hers, she asks, “Mamma, what’s it like to be a fish?” Before I can utter a word, she turns back to the tank and whispers to the glass, “I wanna be a fish. Fish live in the best place in the world!”
How deeply I want that to be true—down to the very saltwater in every one of my cells.
Leave a comment