Read the published version of Library Director Charlotte
Canelli's column in the August 30, 2013 edition of the Norwood Transcript
and Bulletin.
Every year sometime in August, most of become aware
of Shark Week. The Discovery Channel
started this sensation over 25 years ago. They started it a way to raise
awareness about sharks, the fish that terrified at least one generation of swimmers
who viewed the 1975 thriller movie, Jaws.
It’s no surprise that in 1987 marine biologists and the Discovery
Channel concluded that the shark needed a more wholesome biography!
Shark Week resumes each year as a television
spectacle complete with charming marine biologists, plenty of gimmicks, and
loads of awesomeness of close-in shots of the fish we love to hate. Some
viewers around the world obsess about the weeklong adventure like tennis fans
tune in to Wimbledon. About twice as many as those who watch Wimbledon,
to be exact.
Sharks have a cartilaginous skeleton which basically
means that they are connected by tissue similar to cartilage which is tougher
than muscle but not as tough as bones.
There are over 470 species of sharks and their dimensions range from
rather small to the biggest fish in the world, or the Whale shark. A shark can
live in freshwater. I bet you didn’t want to know that. I didn’t.
Greg Skomal, a neighbor of ours in Marion, MA, is
one of the scientists studying sharks off of New England coast. A “wisecracking biologist” (as the Boston
Globe wrote in the Sunday Globe Magazine this past August 18), Dr. Skomal knows
his stuff. He has operated on the vessel
Ocearch that scouts the coastal waters off the Cape, particularly Chatham, and
he has been tagging sharks with a team of marine biologists, often videotaped
by the Discovery Channel. Working for the Commonwealth in the Marine Fisheries
department, Skomal and other scientists hope to discover enough about sharks to
keep everyone – including sharks – safer
in the water.
If you’d like to browse a coffee table book or two
about sharks, there are dozens of large encyclopedias and living color
photographic essays. If you are looking
for great books for children, searching the catalog for sharks brings up
hundreds of titles including “The Big Book of Sharks: Shark Week 25 Jawsome
Years” (2012).
Susan Casey wrote a gripping account of the sharks
that populate the waters off another coast – near the Farallones Islands thirty
miles north of San Francisco in “The Devil’s Teeth” (2005). The islands are nicknamed The Devil’s
Teeth, but Casey includes a color photograph of a bite of a surfboard that one
shark had for lunch. These waters are dangerous, and journalist Casey details
her journey with the Great Whites.
But there are other fish in the sea to read about
and for other purposes. Numerous authors
have written about them in recent years, especially species imperiled by
overfishing.
This past year, readers for the Massachusetts
Center for the Book selected 6 Non-Fiction Must Reads for 2013. Included
was Matt Rigney’s “In Pursuit of Giants: One Man’s Global Search for the Last
of the Great Fish” (2012). Rigney has
been angling New England waters, particularly Maine, for most of his life. He
has delighted in encountering marlin, bluefin tuna and swordfish while far out
in the waters off the coast. It is the commercial fishing industry that has
disheartened Rigney. He describes the valiant efforts of many to
right this story and save the oceans’ giants, “the lions and tigers of the
sea".
Ted Danson, otherwise identified as bartender Sam
Malone in Cheers, lives here in New England.
He and others founded the American Oceans Campaign (AOC), an
organization with a purpose to warn us about abuses in
our oceans. Danson is the author of “Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and
What We Can Do to Save Them” (2011). Not
only have we been poisoning our oceans with petroleum, acid, and waste, but we
are destroying the ocean’s biosystems with commercial overfishing. Most of this has occurred over only fifty
years. Danson tells us that the delusion that there will be plenty of salmon,
swordfish, tuna, and other fish will last longer in the US where we have the
means to keep buying and eating them. He, like others, writes about
the hope of sustainable fisheries and the promise of enlightened
people around the world.
Author Mark Kurlansky has been investigating and
writing about fish for several decades.
His books aren’t, of course, daring tales of hunting the Great Whites or
tagging them off the coast of Cape Cod.
They are, rather, tales of the history of foraging, fishing and eating a
species. His 1997 book “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World”
became a global bestseller. (Kurlansky followed his adult book with an
enlightening children’s picture book, “A Cod’s Tale” in 2001). His 2006 book, “The Big Oyster: History on
the Half Shell” tells the story of the oyster that played a tremendous role in
New York City’s history and economy. In
2009, he wrote “The Last Fish Tale” about commercial fishery economy and
culture in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In
a book for kids 10 and up that reads like a graphic novel, Kurlansky
illustrates the options of sustainable fishing in “A World Without Fish” and persuades
them to inform their parents about which fish to buy and eat.
Another author who has focused on fish is Richard
Ellis. “Swordfish: A Biography of the
Ocean Gladiator” (2013) and “Tuna: A Love Story” (2008). Both books ask us to balance our palates with
the health of the planet. Ellis has been writing about the inhabitants of the
oceans for decades and “The Book of Sharks” (1976) and “Encyclopedia of the
Sea” (2000). Two more recent books also call on us to protect the world’s
seafood: “Four Fish: the Future of the Last Wild Food” by Paul Greenberg (2011)
and “The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans and
Feeding the World” by Andy Sharpless and Suzannah Evans (2013).
Sometimes, knowledge is all it takes for us to make
modest modifications to our lifestyle to preserve the planet,
including the waters of our lakes, rivers and those off of
our coasts. If you’d like to read more
about consuming the best protein, seafood and fish, and yet
also help maintain life on earth, visit the library or the
Minuteman Library catalog.
