Foreword
Yes, fish are food. But they are so much more.
In The Marlin’s Fiery Eye and Other Tales from the Extraordinary World of Marine Fishes, Joe E. Meisel introduces us to fish as wild beings, living out their own lives. Like us, they seek shelter, look for food, and reproduce. But they do these things in wildly different ways, shaped by hundreds of millions of years of evolution in an environment that is radically different from our own. To paraphrase Charles Darwin: there seems to be no limit to the beauty and infinite complexity of the adaptations of living beings to their environments.
I had my own awakening to the lives of fishes and other ocean wildlife. I grew up near the sea, and my relationship with it as a boy was defined by what I could see from the sandy beaches. The ocean would reveal rare glimpses of its life, in the form of a dolphin undulating through the waves or grunion writhing on the beach during spawning season. But for the most part, the murky waters off my hometown obscured the life in the water. Then I discovered tidepools.
Tidepools lifted the ocean’s veil a little more. Strange and beautiful life forms like anemones and hermit crabs were easy and fun to watch in the pools during low tides. As I gained more understanding of the ocean in my academic studies, the relationship changed. The ocean became the object of my fascination as I sought to learn everything I could about it from books and my teachers. Decades of experiencing the ocean in various ways, from meditating on the shore to scuba diving, deepened the relationship. For a time, I lived on a platform about 50 feet above an isolated coral reef. From there I could watch the movements of animals from dawn to dusk. I did several dives a day to check transects and run experiments. After a while, I felt my relationship with the reef shift again. I started to recognize individual barracuda and their hunting grounds. The same group of reef squid would come over to check my work periodically. I started to feel a sense of community as the life and the rhythms of the reef became more familiar.
One of the lessons I learned, and one that’s reflected in The Marlin’s Fiery Eye and Other Tales from the Extraordinary World of Marine Fishes, is that with familiarity and belongingness comes love and compassion. And with love and compassion comes protectiveness and reciprocity—a new kind of relationship with the ocean and its wildlife.
We humans are story tellers. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are give rise to our values, beliefs, and actions. Some of the stories we tell about what corporations or nations are for give rise to amazing feats of cooperation, while others result in exploitation, strife, and war. One story that some of us used to tell about nature is that nature’s bounty is inexhaustible. Once that was proved to be false, some of us told another story about how nature exists to serve us, but that we needed to exploit natural resources sustainably. It now seems clear that the sustainability story is not going to have an entirely happy ending. The destruction of life-sustaining habitats and emissions of pollutants that are altering the life support systems of the entire planet have continued, with catastrophic effects.
The Marlin’s Fiery Eye and Other Tales from the Extraordinary World of Marine Fishes includes many fascinating stories about how people have discovered, used, and come to understand fish over the centuries. But it also contains stories about people caring for the ocean and its life, as well as the amazing stories about the fish themselves. Readers get an extended look at a world teeming with fish leading remarkable lives that is mostly invisible to us, most of the time. These are the plot elements of a new story about a reciprocal relationship with nature, one in which we are responsible for repairing the damage that we have caused. A story in which fish are food but also our partners on this planet, inspiring respect, awe, and a sense that we part of something larger than ourselves.
Rod Fujita
April 24, 2023