Hooked on Tuna
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Still pretty big though. But the huge ones are mostly sold at auction for sushi afaik
One posing picture with lots of blood I found particularly appalling. https://wonews.com/recent-assessment-shows-bluefin-tuna-numb... (warning: don't click if you can't look at blood.)
I guess for me, empathy with animals is strongly correlated with their size.
Like ok I can respect hunters getting meat from nature vs a factory farm, but when your standing in blood smiling ear to ear because you took a life and then photograph it to brag to your like minded friends, it gets pretty weird and psychopathic.
It's also the fact that these animals regularly live 30 to 40 years.
My father passed away last year, and I've been cooking in his place. Fitting for this article, we've helped make little tunny (Euthynnus alletteratus, "bacoreta" here) popular again in our town.
The tuna history here goes back a long way. Almuñécar was the Roman town of Sexi, named by Julius Caesar himself, and our restaurant sits right in front of the remains of its fish-salting factory, one of the most important in the Roman Empire. Sexi minted its own coins, with two tuna on them. It was also famous for a "psychedelic" garum made for the Roman elite from salema (Sarpa salpa), a fish people here call "siete cólicas".
Most phytoplankton, i.e. unicellular algae, is eaten by zooplankton, i.e. mostly by small crustaceans, like copepods.
The fish that eat other animals vastly outnumber the fish that eat algae or aquatic plants.
In open water environments, the kinds of bigger animals, i.e. fish, cephalopods, chaetognaths, cnidarians, ctenophores are almost all predators who, unless they eat each other, they are eating zooplankton that consists mostly of small crustaceans and of planktonic larvae of the animals that live on the bottom.
> The fish that eat other animals vastly outnumber the fish that eat algae or aquatic plants.
This is why I said "if you count all sea creatures". The original comment said "most fish are predators because there isn't much vegetation". As you say, there is quite a lot of vegetation, and there are many more sea creatures in that category than there are predators.
So, most fish are predators, but not at all for the reason in the original comment. It remains true that population and total biomass drop off exponentially as you go up in the food chain (which is really the only point I was trying to make).
The main reason while the majority of big aquatic animals are eating other animals, while the majority of the big terrestrial animals are eating plants, is the disparity in size between big animals and most aquatic primary producers, which requires at least one intermediate layer of small animals, who gather efficiently the small algae, packaging the nutrients and energy into bigger bodies, which can be gathered efficiently by the big animals.
The multicellular algae have bodies with a poor content of nutrients, because unlike terrestrial plants they do not need to store large reserves of nutrients in body parts like seeds or roots modified for storage, reserves that would be needed sometime in the future, after finding a place to germinate or after an unfavorable season passes. The stems of multicellular algae typically have only the purpose to anchor them to the bottom, to avoid being swept away by currents, so they do not need to contain much edible substance.
So only a few animals, e.g. sea urchins and some snails or chitons and few fish, have developed the special adaptations required to graze multicellular algae, like adequate teeth, because the reward for such an adaptation is not great and the places with abundant multicellular algae are typically restricted to regions close to shores.
Cows can get big by eating grass because most of the land is covered in plants, but tuna can't get big by eating seaweed because most of the sea is abyss.
Anyway, tuna don't just eat zooplankton, they eat smaller fish. And most fish are definitely not predators of this kind, because that would be mathematically impossible.
I have no idea about biomass ratios, but I'm pretty sure there are more species of fish that eat other fish than not.
Predators are also a lot more expensive to raise as domestic animals. Pigs are omnivores, and chickens will eat some small animals. We feed them what is cheap. Animal feeds do sometimes contain waste meat or fish.
People do eat reptilian predators. I have eaten crocodile and monitor lizard, a number of others are eaten.