Fishy business
At Woods Hole, 'Saturday Night Live' meets science
WOODS HOLE - I was entranced last week by a bumper sticker on a pickup truck here that read, "They call it tourist season so why can't we shoot them?"
Superb question. If I lived here, I'd have one too. When the hordes arrive after Memorial Day for the summer siege at the Martha's Vineyard ferry dock, this village is transformed from a lovely spot to one of those lab experiments where people in white coats put too many rats together and document sociopathic behavior.
But you forget all this on a sublime day in April, when the breeze loses its bite, the sun surfs the waves, and the dark, weird Cape winter is a bad dream. Then you ponder what unfathomable things the smarties in the warren of research outfits here are up to.
The Marine Biological Laboratory is always worth a peek. Sure enough, the crazy, zany MBL folks are running an experiment that strikes me as a lovely mix of "Saturday Night Live" and serious science.
What they're doing is training fish in classic Pavlovian fashion to feed at a particular place at the sound of an underwater tone. (So why not go for broke and also train them to jump into an oven?)
Scott Lindell, director of MBL's aquaculture program, and research assistant Simon Miner are conducting these tests with help from researchers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, propelled by a $270,000 federal grant.
They have almost 200 young bass spread among six circular tanks in a huge room full of other bizarro fishy contraptions. I watch the tests on a computer screen because, it turns out, fish are curious and will check me out if I'm in their view.
Okay, I see fish swim around in one tank. Then Miner hits a middle-range underwater tone for 30 seconds and damned if they then all don't swim to a segregated area in the tank and wait for food pellets to be released.
The game plan is to attach half of a geodesic dome, about 30 feet in circumference and 15 feet high, to the floor of Buzzards Bay sometime in May or June and keep it there until October.
The trained fish, along with 5,000 other juvenile bass kept in other tanks, will be tagged and put into this closed Captain Nemo-like structure.
After a couple of weeks of conditioning there - more noise for food - the dome will be opened and the fish will take off.
The great existential question is, will they come back? And, might a trained bass tell a friend, "Hey, Jimmy, there are freebies at the dome" or hightail it for Cuttyhunk?
Lindell hasn't a clue. "This is a first-try bottle rocket," adds Miner. Both will be happy campers if half of the fish are still there in October.
If this works with 5,000 fish, it could work with100,000 black sea bass conditioned in a larger dome. More to the point, it could eventually lead to a more efficient way to catch fish, period.
Imagine a commercial boat arrives at a dome full of fish and harvests them. Quick, easy, save on gas and time. Something's got to give because traditional fishing, all agree, will never meet the long-term world food needs.
"I relate this to free-range chickens," says Lindell. "This is free-range fish." (Others call this "aqua ranching," which sounds like the name of an Andy Warhol acolyte back in the day.) The Lindell idea is midway between tightly packed fish farms - which pollute and carry risks of disease transmission - and traditional fishing.
There is an emotional side to all this. The romantic image of the fisherman on his own in the ocean is timeless and will be hard to change. Think of a fisherman like the American cowboy, who faded as his open-range cattle ended up in stockyards (with terrifying results). Fishing must change too, but avoid the horrors of the modern beef industry.
"Fishing is 200 years behind other forms of raising food," notes John Bullard, Bill Clinton's point man for Northeast fisheries crisis. "This is absolutely the kind of thing we need to be doing."
That said, the environmental group Coalition For Buzzards Bay is concerned about the concentration of nitrogen fish waste that could accrue around the feeding station. Also, if this scheme works, it will face the same issue that has hampered the siting of windmills in Nantucket Sound - who sets the rules for this natural resource extraction from public land?
All this is endlessly interesting but what captivates the Observer is the issue of fish memory. To wit: Is it better than mine? Miner says he has trained his bass to remember the food conditioning upwards of 10 days after stopping it, and he has only begun to test.
This matters because fish in New England waters generally take two seasons to reach market size, says Lindell. So they must remember in spring what they were conditioned to do in the previous fall before they left for warmer waters - a tall order for the Observer, let alone a black sea bass. But who knows?
What I love about this experiment is no one knows what will happen.
It reminds me how cool science is, how practitioners complete their due diligence and then say damn the torpedoes. I miss this kind of thinking in the rest of our culture today.
Me, I say from personal experience that free food trumps everything.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.
