ASK CLAUDIO - DISCOVER THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE SCENES
Learn more about the wacky world of underwater marine sex with GREEN PORNO's marine biologist, Dr. Claudio Campagna!
CLICK ON AN ANIMAL TO LEARN MORE:
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THE FISH CLOUD
Rocks, pebbles, sand grains... anchovies. These animals embody the essence of the bulkiness, the massive, the infinite. Anchovies are not seen as fish, they are resources valued as "biomass," a tailored-made concept for quantity. Individuals are substituted by metric tons; their identity is that of the impersonal. Anchovies are resources, their populations are stocks, and their abundance is assessed with the only purpose to ensure "sustainable yields," money for fisheries. Small fish by the thousands, all looking alike... clouds of protein.
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REALITY BITES
Although there is some truth in the above perspective, it hides a huge misunderstanding: anchovy may perhaps be abundant, but are not infinite; no form of life is infinite, a difficult truth to learn.
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THE MULTIPURPOSE FISH
Anchovies are several species belonging to a family distributed in the temperate oceans of the world. They live in schools, near the surface, where, like a gargantuan mouth, filter the seas, extracting small plankton cells for nourishment. In turn, everything eats anchovies, they are forage fish, preyed upon by numerous other fish, squids, birds, marine mammals. Predators eat the larvae and the juveniles and, obviously, the adults.
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THE PERFECT PIZZA TOPPING
Humans eat them too, but not much. Too small, too salty, too unattractive, a good part of the world has not discovered the culinary qualities of anchovies. This is a real pity, as it makes much more sense to eat anchovies than to consume the big fish, often characterized by small populations and low recovery rates. Yet humans capture anchovies by the many millions of tons per year. The Peruvian fisheries, for example, land more than 10,000,000 tons of anchovetas per year. They also crashed the population more than once, with terrible consequences for people and wildlife. Other anchovy populations are not fully exploited, meaning more damage can yet be done.
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END OF THE LINE
What do we do with the trillions and trillions of individual anchovies caught but not consumed as food? We turn them into pellets and flour. Pellets feed other fish, such as salmon and trout, often introduced to pristine places to sustain commercial fish farming and destroying local wildlife. Anchovy protein is found in food for pets, from dogs to cats to turtles. Finally, anchovy flour is used as a fertilizer.
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SAFETY IN NUMBERS
Anchovy spawn year-round, and more than once, usually in coastal waters. Spawning peaks in summer and winter. Females are very fecund and release thousands of eggs per individual, the typical reproductive strategy of animals exposed to high mortality that do not guard their young. Living in schools and feeding at night might help the individual anchovy prolong its life at the cost of the life of their neighbors. Safety in numbers is the way out when one is small and lives surrounded only by waters. With no places to hide the bodies of other companions are the only protection.
