Cephalopodcast

In the tradition of Internet adages, I’d like to add another. In any discussion of sea life, no matter how rare, strange or disgusting, some knucklehead will always ask how well it goes with lemon or butter. I am calling this Gorton’s Law.

Now the more compelling question is to ask why this happens. Why do so many people consider the sea to be a smorgasbord? What difference is there between animals in the ocean and ones on land? For many, I suppose there is none. For example, on a swamp tour in Louisiana, our guide was kind enough to remind us that in his great state, if it bleeds, they eat it. However, Sylvia Earl, in her book Sea Change, makes the point that we often eat higher up on the oceanic food chain than we do on the terrestrial one. She equates eating tuna with eating bushmeat. But it is true that many cultures do not eat large carnivores. Is this just because lions, tigers and bears are comparatively rare in the environment? Is that just because we have already extirpated them in our past? Obviously, it is certainly more dangerous to tangle with them than a herbivore. And perhaps that is the key. Even the fiercest of oceanic predators are manageable once landed. It can be a struggle to get a grouper on board, but once on deck it doesn’t take much to subdue it. So maybe it’s just a matter of buoyancy.

Many who would recognize the absurdity of a plan to sustain large and growing numbers of people by hunting and gathering from the land buffalol, deer, wild birds, rabbits, squirrels, roots, and berries seem to disengage their power of reason when it comes to the sea, apparently believing, somehow, that ocean systems are fundamentally different from those on the land, that they can year after year yield huge, comercially viable takes of wild-caught organisms and rebound indefinitely.

-Sylvia Earl, Sea Change