As is the case for most of the INCREDIBLE CREATURES on our planet, people forget how ~truly remarkable~ fish are. Having been around and around and around the ocean block for the last ~530 million years, that’s a lot of time to evolve and mature to be super fucking cool.
Before we get into it, credit where credit is due, most of the sweet fish facts I’ve outlined here I learned from the book What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe, a biologist with a PhD in ethology (the study of animal behavior, the coolest -ology I’ve ever heard of).
SO then what, you ask, makes fish so undeniably amazing?
Fish connect to the Earth’s magnetic field!!!
This one had to be first because it just makes me think fish are superheroes disguised as little guppies. And their superpower in this case is *extreme navigation abilities* since some fish (salmon, tuna, dolphins, stingrays, whales, lobsters, and more) use Earth’s magnetic connection to guide them throughout their lives. Whether it’s back to the same streams they spawned in at birth or across the ocean to migrate, these fantastic fish can sense an invisible, energetic force field connected to our entire planet. And if that isn’t the coolest thing you've heard all day then don’t even talk to me! On second thought, please do talk to me and tell me about the even cooler thing.
Fish are crazy good at smelling I know, WILD because fish noses are so petite and slit-like and low key (with exception to the unicorn fish), you would never guess! But fish can smell wayyyy better than humans - and even dogs. A shark’s sense of smell is 100,000 times better than humans, and eels are said to have the best smell of ALL. Go eeeeels.
They seek pleasure and touch This one makes me want to cry. And cuddle up with a sweetie pie fish. Fish have a nervous system (they feel pain just like any other creature) and their own unique comfort preferences. They love cuddles, belly rubs from familiar humans, and the feeling of bubbles on their skin. There are countless experiences documented that show fish engaging and playing with divers and owners (trust me, you can dive down a deep and adorable YouTube rabbit hole on this). Once they’re comfy, some fish truly love to be touched and caressed, swimming near their human friends and asking for pets. Awwwwww.
Electric eels are basically fish Pikachus These Pokemon eels can grow up to 7 feet long and weigh up to 45 pounds. They use low voltage discharge to help them puruse murky ass habitats by detecting electric fields that bounce off of solid objects. They can also create MEGA discharges up to 600 volts or more! Electric organs are housed in stacked cells (like a battery) and electricity can be stockpiled until needed, then all released at once. BAM! Electric eels essentially have a built-in taser gun that can stun *or kill* prey or intruders. Sea Pikachu is a sparkplug renegade.
~~~NEW COLORS~~~ Even in our most mystical-rainbow-burst and opalescent dream sequences, as far as I know humans can’t experience or truly fathom new colors. Fish, on the other fin, can see in multiple different color spectrums! Must be nice. Bummer fish can’t speak English and describe what ~mastrydum~ looks like (idk that’s what I imagine a new color would be named).
They taste through the FACE Yes, you read that right. A fish’s sense of taste goes beyond just their tongue and expands to their whole mouth and face! Le duh why they are awesome at navigating all kinds of waters and identifying quality grub not only with their noses, but their entire MUGS (faces)(just trying to switch it up). I feel like fish deserve their own fish-food version of a baby's 1st birthday party smash cake, because they could truly enjoy every bit of it! Plus it would be cute and fun.
Team work makes the dream work Fish work together and collaborate! Not just familial fish, but interspecies too! There are lots of little fish designated as ‘cleaner’ fish (tiny guys) and then there are fish that we call ‘client’ fish (bigger bois). Hundreds of different client fish allow (and encourage) cleaner fish to inspect and eat parasites, dead skin, algae, etc off of their scales and in their mouths, even. Cleaners get some food, clients get spruced up, and in exchange for their services, the clients don’t eat the cleaners. Cleaner fish are super important for keeping biodiversity and preventing client fish from being taken over by parasites. Yay, tiny guys! Also super cool - one particular fish, called a groomer fish, uses body shimmies and head pointing gestures to invite moray eels to hunt with them. Then this motley pair goes off and double teams their prey. Aw. We love this collab.
Similar to silly gooses, fish have personalities
A sage quote I really enjoy from my friend Keegan goes “two people are two people.” Well, according to science, two fish are two fish. Fish act differently based on their environments. Related to an earlier fun fact, some fish like belly rubs, and some fish are shy. One example I particularly ~love~ is that mobula rays will routinely leap out of the water into the air. There is no useful reason why they would do this, and scientists believe they do it purely for enjoyment. I mean, hell yeah, that sounds so fun. Imagine a human trying to do that. Ugh.. we’re embarrassing ourselves.. in my mind.
They do some *CoMpLeX* stuff Archer fish expertly spit water out of their mouths to knock bugs and other food down into the water for them to snatch up. Little fish observe their elder fish and learn how to truly... spit game. Pufferfish spend hoursss constructing gorgeous circular sand nests to attract mates. These little indents resemble the artistry of Picasso. And they decorate them with little shells. :')
The blackspot tuskfish consistently uses rocks to bash open clams for some A-1 nibbles. The finesse this takes is unreal! Fish recognize each other and familiar humans, and studies have shown they have preferences in who they hang with - i.e. fish friendships. Brb, happy crying.
Are you convinced that fish are amazing yet???
Fish got here over 500 million (500,000,000 - that’s 8 zeros) years ago. While some of our human ancestors (apes, essentially, not even quite walking on their hind legs) got here ~2.5 million years ago, humans (evolved as we are today) JUST strolled in 200,000 years ago.
We’ve been here literally 0.04% of the time that fish have.
We’ve been fishing for thousands of lifetimes - it’s a prehistoric practice dating back at least 40,000 years. Human-related species were likely fishing well before the current homosapien was even fully formed. Fish were probably a vital contribution to the evolution of humans.
But there were a lottt less humans back then.
In the most recent 100 years of human evolution or so, our global population has soared, along with the ubiquity of the commercial fishing industry.
What used to be a primitive, natural protein source for humans thousands of years ago has become a billion-dollar business built off the mass exploitation of our fare-watered friends.
Eating fish hasn't been sustainable for a while now.
A lot of people around this time in the conversation will say something like, well Jess what if you could just buy the fair trade organic fish, completely void of any mercury/chemicals/pollution, the fish lived a happy life and said it’s goodbyes the day prior, there’s plenty more fish for the ecosystem to flourish, our grizzly bear friends have enough to snag for themselves, what then???
While that would be an ideaaaal, adorable, stunning scenario, it’s just not how we source our fish today.
Modern day fishing is fueled by profit. Paradoxical as it may sound, humans are eating more fish than ever while global fish populations shrink and the number of collapsed fisheries have grown consistently since the 1950’s. Commercial fishing populations are being over-exploited and farmed fish are polluting the oceans. It’s all a big mess, so I’ll keep the fast facts coming to try and make it more palatable.
Why commercial fishing sucks:
We don’t have enough fish left in the oceans to feed our growing population.
85% of global fisheries are either over-exploited or completely depleted, and some research expects the entire industry to collapse before 2050. This leaves us without fish on our plates aaand the ocean’s ecosystems devoid of all biodiversity. It’s not clear today how much marine life will be able to recover, if at all. SUCKS.
Bottom trawling is common practice. That means massive nets drudge across the ocean floor and destroy or capture anything in its way, killing countless sea creatures (dolphins, turtles, birds, sharks, you name it) as bycatch. Some scientists equate the damage to that of clear-cutting old forests.
Elliot Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute, says, “Bottom-trawling is the largest disturbance to the world’s sea floor and possibly the largest human-caused disturbance to the biosphere.”
Fueled by bottom trawling, bycatch accounts for 40% of total global fish catch, accounting for about 200 million wasted pounds of dead sea critters DAILY. Sucksssss.
Nearly half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of fishing nets, which not only pollute our oceans but also lethally trap sea animals. S U C K S.
Fish are killed in insanely inhumane ways. Ammonia baths, suffocation, and decompression are common, while some caught via longline hooks are impaled for hours (or days) dragged MILES back to the dock in pain. Horrendously sucks.
Fish are currently hunting birds out of desperation because of the lack of typical food in their ecosystem (i.e. other fish). Kind of badass… but still sucks.
We stereotype sharks as vicious killers but the ratio to their toll on us compared to our toll on them via fishing is about 1 to 5,000,000. Sucks x 5 million. (Also SUPER fun fact: Vending machines kill more people annually than sharks do.)
Of the 125,000 new chemicals developed since the industrial revolution, over 85,000 have been found in fish due to pollution. Makes sense that pregnant and nursing women are told to avoid eating them. Fish consumption is the most prominent source of exposure to mercury, arsenic, DDT, neurotoxins, and prescription drugs. Sucks. Sucks. Sucks. Sucks.
Why farmed fishing sucks:
Fish are treated like commodities, unnaturally stuffed in pens so close together that disease runs rampant due to the rapid build up of literal *shit* - epitome of sucks.
The combination of fertilizers, chemicals, fishmeal, antibiotics, and pesticides used make the water runoff from fish farms toxic, not only to the fish inside, but the fish outside of the farms in the ocean, and neighboring communities. SUCKS!
Sea lice. Everywhere. Sea lice are disgusting parasite freaks that eat fish alive (you're truly lucky I decided not to add a photo of them to this post). Death rates of 30% are considered swell and acceptable in fish farms. Scarier even is that sea lice aren't confined to the pens - they wreak havoc on wild fish around the vicinity of the farms. Sucksssss.
Sea lice are credited for massive die-offs of 80% of wild pink salmon on Canada’s Pacific coast. Also means bad news for all the amazing salmon-dependent creatures like bears, eagles, and orcas. Extra sucks.
All in all, modern day fishing sucks.
I think this anecdote that Balcombe shares in What A Fish Knows kind of sums it up. Something not many of us consider when eating fish is that the most common fish sold today are the biggest, baddest fish in the sea. Eating tuna is like eating the tigers of the ocean - the tough, lightning fast, apex predators. This bizarre pattern has resulted in whacked out food chains and significant species loss.
What’s wild is that a bluefin tuna is actually much bigger than a tiger - measuring up to 10 feet and weighing 1,500lbs. Unsurprisingly considering our barbaric and unsustainable fishing practices, tuna populations are estimated to be down by 96% since 1960.
A study by the WWF and the Zoological Society of London concluded that holistic fish populations were cut in half from 1970 to 2012, where some species had fallen by 75%. Today, overfishing threatens the survival of almost every fish or ocean creature you can imagine.
Fishing of any sorts these days is detrimental, inhumane, and gross. It is OUT. Let’s leave it in the past.
“It’s easy to condemn the cruelty and waste rampant in the commercial fishing industries. But consumers must acknowledge their complicity. In any supply-and-demand economy, demand is the fuel that drives the engine of supply. When we eat fish, we fund their capture.” - Jonathan Balcombe
I get that some people will be hesitant to stop consuming fish out the gate. But consider at the very least reducing your intake, so the supply-and-demand economy can start to shift.
Concerned about those omega 3s? Just incorporate walnuts, flax seeds, chia seeds, seaweed or algae oil into your grubbing and supplementing. Those fatty acids are important, but you don’t need fish oil to get them. Likewise, the plant-based fish market is booming and sustainable options will continue to expand and make alternative choices easier over time.
Our biggest advantage in human evolution so far hasn’t been our invention of tools like spears and hooks to catch fish, but our brain's ability to communicate and understand one another. So I guess that’s the point of this whole ramble!
It’s hard to argue against the blatant fact that fish are incredible creatures, worthy of sustained life on this planet. They’ve been here a lot longer than us. Yet it’s us, who have evolved to impact and threaten their existence so rapidly, that needs to take on the responsibility to protect them.
If you’re curious to read tangential thoughts, I wrote a bit about how we can eat our way to utopia back in 2020 (spoiler: it’s plant-based and cell-based meat).
Anyway…
Fish are cool! Let's try and save them.