The Net Closes

“The noble fish, weighing up to four hundred pounds apiece, swam around and around…We pondered how it would feel to be trapped with the other animals and have to live their tragedy. Dumas and I were the only ones in the creeping, constricting prison who knew the outcome, and we were destined to escape. Perhaps we were oversentimental but we were ashamed of the knowledge. I had an impulse to take my belt knife and cut a hole for a mass break to Freedom.

The death chamber was reduced to a third of its size. The atmosphere grew excited, franctic. The herd swam restlessly faster, but still in formation. Their eyes passed us with almost human expressions of fright.

…Never have I beheld a site lie the death cell in the last moments. The fish were out of control…With the seeming momentum of locomotives, the tuna drove at me, head-on, obliquely, crosswise. It was out of the question for me to dodge them. Frightened out of sense of time, I….surfaced amidst the thrashing bodies. There was not a mark on my body. Even while running amok the giant fish had avoided me by inches, merely massaging me with backwash as they sped past.”

A poignant passage from The Silent World, by that deity of the deep, Jacques Costeau via another brilliant book, Song for the Blue Ocean by Carl Safina about the last moments of some Blue-finned tuna as a seine net closes in on them.

Read both books, especially the Song for the Blue Ocean. It is a moving, accurate, heavily researched account of what we are doing to the ocean. Of how we are destroying on of the life support systems that keeps us human alive on this spaceship earth.