Song for the Swordfish

By Carl Safina

Recently, more than 300 of the country's top chefs took swordfish off their menus. Here's why you may never see another one of these magnificent fish, dead or alive.

At 4:00 each morning, New York City's Fulton Fish Market bustles and bangs with people in the latter half of their workday. Brightly lit, open crates display fish from around the world. Several tables are stacked with headless cadavers labeled swordfish -- from New England, the Caribbean, South America, Hawaii, New Zealand, and elsewhere. The United States imports swordfish flesh from more than 50 countries. But don't confuse the death-colored trunks of market meat with the creatures themselves. You have no more experienced this animal by eating a swordfish steak than you have enountered an elephant by fingering a piano's ivory keys.

Once, in the Caribbean, I did briefly glimpse a swordfish. A school of skipjack tuna had surfaced and was chasing prey in streaks of foam. Just beyond the tuna, a much larger creature rose. The dorsal and tail fins were unmistakable, and the swordfish gave the impression of an animal of heft, moving with the confidence of a top predator. Then the fins sank out of sight.

These days, most fishers know swordfish chiefly by their absence, by old-timers' stories and black-and-white photos on the walls of long-established harborside bars. The swordfish, also known as the broadbill, may be the fastest-declining creature in the Atlantic Ocean. Its status is worst -- and best studied -- in the North Atlantic. Overfishing is also depleting the species in the South Atlantic, as pressure intensifies there. Pacific swordfish remain in better shape, though catching swordfish anywhere entails high bycatch of other marine animals.

In 1996 the World Conservation Union added the words "swordfish, North Atlantic" to its Red List of Threatened Animals. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service warned in 1997, "If the North Atlantic stock continues to decline at the same rate it has since 1978 . . . the commercial fishery may not be viable in approximately 10 years." Overfishing has cost this population roughly 70 percent of its breeding-age animals since the 1960s, putting many former swordfishers out of business.

Regardless of whether you value the Atlantic swordfish as wild predator, challenging opponent, business meat, or food, your habit may become unsustainable in the foreseeable future. In fact, swordfish is already off some menus. A group of top chefs recently gathered in New York to announce that they were going to "give swordfish a break." Royal Caribbean Cruises, which usually serves 20 tons of swordfish per year, has announced that it will now serve none, at least until a recovery plan is in place for the North Atlantic population.

A solitary predator stalking the world's warm and temperate seas, the swordfish hunts mainly under moonlight by diving into cold, deep waters. It adjusts to the chilly depths by using an extraordinary suite of thermal exchangers to warm its swimming muscles, and a remarkable organ whose sole function is to heat the fish's brain and its enormous eyes, which help it hunt in the dark. This warmth gives swordfish a tremendous advantage over prey whose own brains and bodies are slowed by the chill.

From its broad bill, which extends more than a third of its body length from its snout, Xiphias gladius derives food, protection, and its name. Slashing with this flat blade, the swift swordfish overwhelms schooling squid, butterfish, herring, and other creatures. One specimen's stomach contained 22 small seabirds known as dovekies.

Large broadbills -- they can exceed half a ton -- can drive their sword through four inches of planking, sinking a boat. One aggressively stabbed a submersible at 2,000 feet, got stuck, and ultimately became dinner on the support ship. But most attacks have been made by harpooned swordfish fighting for their lives: One enraged and panicked fish tore a dory in half and kept on slashing.

Until the 1960s, American fishermen caught virtually all swordfish by hand-thrown harpoon (a technique still used on giant tuna in New England). They commonly caught 12 or more fish a day. For well over a century, the hard-charging swordfish showed every indication of being able to hold its own. Its nosedive began in the 1960s, with the advent of a new, industrial-strength type of gear: the longline. Usually made of monofilament, these fishing lines stretch 25 to 40 miles in length. They are baited with hundreds of hooks. A few longline fisheries (notably for Alaskan halibut) are conservatively managed and appear healthy. But longlining has widely depleted the top predators: swordfish, tunas, and sharks.

Japanese boats brought longlines to the Atlantic in the late 1950s, scouring for tuna. Americans soon adapted the technique for broadbills. Harpooning for swordfish requires calm seas and waiting until a large fish surfaces to warm itself from the chill of a long, deep dive. Long-lining suffers no such constraints. A longline goes to the heart of the ocean, where the fish hunt, and takes everything that haunts the hungry depths, including the juvenile and unwanted fishes, the occasional endangered turtle, and the odd marine mammal. Such unwanted creatures are collectively known as bycatch.

The first time a swordfish took bait on an American longline was in 1961, as it hunted some 70 miles south of Long Island in the Hudson Canyon. American longliners soon began venturing far south of traditional harpooning grounds, fishing all winter and striking it rich. One fisherman from New Bedford, Massachusetts, gushed, "The entire Atlantic is loaded with broadbills, and they can be obtained all year."

The number of swordfish caught on longlines grew so breathtakingly that people feared the great gladiator would be depleted. They soon found a way to allay their worries, however. One newspaper summed it up in 1963 by saying that because swordfish laid prodigious numbers of eggs (several million at a time, several times a year), "fishing for the broadbill by . . . longline will not diminish the resource."

But in fact, the swordfish catch began declining almost immediately. And between 1989 and 1996 East Coast swordfish landings plummeted almost 60 percent (from about 11.3 million to 4.9 million pounds). Earnings plunged from almost $36.5 million to just over $17.6 million. Meanwhile, the number of longline hooks set in the Atlantic increased 70 percent between 1987 and 1995 -- from 6.5 million to more than 11 million. And that was just from American boats, which take only about a third of the North Atlantic broadbill catch.

Harpoons took only mature adults that had spawned several times, because only large swordfish bask, or "fin," at the surface. Today the submarine canyons and banks these animals prowl are so spaghettied with baited lines that more than 80 percent of the female swordfish caught are immature, killed before they can breed. (Female swordfish take at least five years to reach sexual maturity, at which point they are almost six feet long.) With longlines taking 98 percent of the swordfish catch, large adult fish are rare in the North Atlantic. Between the early 1960s and today, the average size of North Atlantic swordfish caught dropped two-thirds, from almost 270 pounds (a large adult that had spawned repeatedly) to 90 pounds (if female, still juvenile). In nursery grounds off Florida, off South Carolina, in the Gulf of Mexico, and elsewhere, longlines catch mostly juveniles. U.S. swordfishers in the Atlantic discard about 40 percent of the swordfish they kill; the fish are too small to sell. In 1996 they dumped 40,000.

Other fish are affected by longlines as well. In the North Atlantic, some of the sea's most magnificent wildlife are declining or depleted, including giant bluefin, bigeye, yellowfin, and albacore tunas; marlins; and sharks. U.S. longliners discard one of every four fish killed. The wasted creatures include both blue and white marlins (deemed "severely overfished" by the National Marine Fisheries Service), sharks (22 "overfished" species), and giant bluefin tuna ("severely overfished"). The agency has made an attempt to conserve some of these species, forbidding U.S. longliners in the Atlantic to keep marlins and most bluefin. But such measures do little to prevent the animals' killing, because longlines catch so indiscriminately. The damage is not limited to fish: Longlining has forced commercial harpooners, charter boats, and recreationally oriented businesses out of swordfishing, and it is hurting businesses catering to recreational fishing for marlin and sharks.

Sixty percent of the domestic swordfish catch comes from the Pacific. Longlining is restricted off California, but many harpooners there have been driven out of business by drift nets, mile-and-a-half-long nets hanging near the surface, which also take a lot of juveniles and bycatch. Jerry Cicconi, who has hunted swordfish by harpoon from Santa Catalina, California, for three decades, refers to drift nets as "the cancer of the ocean." He has seen swordfish and other large fish decline since drift nets targeting swordfish arrived in the late 1970s. "Blue sharks used to be very common, and it was common to see thresher sharks jumping on the horizon, but today we almost never see them," he says. "Using drift gill nets and longlines miles long is like hunting deer with a machine gun and shooting into the whole herd. You might get the animal you wanted, but you'll kill and waste a lot of other animals. It is sad and wrong that we human beings have allowed such devastation."

Who's in charge? The National Marine Fisheries Service has authority over fishing within 200 miles of the U.S. coastline. It can ban harmful fishing gear or declare off-limits areas where young fish congregate -- if it chooses. But it cannot lower swordfish quotas, because in 1990 lobbyists for the longlining industry got Congress to tie the U.S. quota to that of the 23-nation Atlantic tuna commission, which also covers swordfish and marlins. The agreement states that the United States may not set or lower catch limits for U.S. boats fishing for swordfish or tuna inside U.S. waters unless Japan, Spain, and a score of other fishing countries agree. The commission's charter, which dates from the 1960s, requires it to maintain sustainable fish populations, but catch limits are often set too high, and even these are often violated.

The commission's science is generally sound, but the catch limits are set by politically appointed commissioners -- many of whom (including two of the three that represent the United States) are employed by or have close ties to commercial- or recreational-fishing industries. In a recent report, the commission's scientists cautioned that "in order to arrest the declining trend . . . catches should not exceed about 10,000 metric tons." To allow recovery to the most productive level over a decade, catches would have to be limited to about 7,000 tons. However, the commissioners decided to set the catch at 11,300 tons for 1997, phasing down to 10,700 tons by 1999. The commission's scientific chair, Ziro Suzuki, Ph.D., responded that even with those "substantially reduced quotas . . . the stock will continue to decline."

A backlash is building. The states of Rhode Island and Massachusetts and federal fishery managers in New England have all criticized the agency for lack of action toward swordfish recovery. South Carolina's Natural Resources Board wrote in January to the Secretary of Commerce, "The following is evident: U.S. pelagic longline fishermen annually take hundreds of tons of highly migratory species . . . (tunas, swordfish, sharks, . . . blue and white marlin), which you have declared overfished . . . . As . . . longline fishermen . . . have moved closer to shore, targeting dolphin, wahoo and yellowfin tuna . . . we fear that these species will also be overfished."

The Ocean Wildlife Campaign -- a coalition that includes the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, and the National Coalition for Marine Conservation -- is also pressing for a recovery plan, which would include longline restrictions, and closure of key nursery and spawning areas in domestic and foreign waters. No one expects the international work to be easy, especially when the U.S. fisheries agency has been unwilling to take the steps that could legally be applied in U.S. waters.

U.S. longliners claim that Atlantic swordfish can't recover unless all the countries catching them agree to coordinated measures. But in the 1970s, when concern over mercury levels in swordfish forced U.S. and Canadian longliners to stop fishing, the broadbills recovered within a decade. They were depleted to current lows after longlining resumed.

In the chill of January, I emerged from the Manhattan subway, walking briskly toward an upscale restaurant called Felidia, where 27 prominent chefs from Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington were gathering to announce they'd be taking swordfish off their menus. The luncheon was part of the new Give Swordfish a Break campaign, spearheaded by the Natural Resources Defense Council and SeaWeb, an organization created by the Pew Charitable Trusts to highlight ocean issues. At the luncheon podium, SeaWeb's executive director, Vikki Spruill, said, "This is the portrait of a natural resource on its way to disaster; but it doesn't have to be this way. We need to take a time-out now and press the government to develop an effective recovery plan." The chefs' ultimate goal is to be able to serve swordfish in the future. Lidia Bastianich, Felidia's owner, declared, "I want to be able to tell the next generation of chefs and restaurateurs that I helped ensure that swordfish would be around for a long time to come." Nora Pouillon, proprietor of Asia Nora, in Washington, D.C., stressed, "This is a break, not a boycott."

Rick Moonen, head chef at Oceana in New York City, said, "We're fishing out everything; the mentality is like the buffalo hunters'. Can we be smarter than that? A chef is supposed to be creative, and if you need to say no to something and change and move on to a new way of doing things, that's creative."

Other chefs have taken swordfish off their menus independent of the campaign. Will Tracy, owner of the Manhattan restaurant Punch, simply stopped offering it a while back. "Ten or fifteen years ago, I'd commonly find two-hundred-pound swordfish in the market," he told me. "Now they're so small they have new names: Between fifty and a hundred pounds, they're called dogs; from twenty-five to fifty, pups; under twenty-five, rats. One day I saw a shipment of swordfish that had come into the Fulton market from [John F. Kennedy] airport -- possibly from the Mediterranean or South America. It had maybe two hundred fish that were no bigger than fifteen pounds each. I find that very disturbing."

American longliners complain bitterly that while they are "playing by the rules," foreign boats are selling undersize swordfish in U.S. markets. That's true, but the American boats are killing and dumping fish that are the same size. Whether swordfish are sold or discarded after they're dead is beside the point. The fact is that longlines kill too many small fish.

Modifying longlines to make them more selective would be an attractive solution. The mortality of unwanted fish could be reduced by pulling the lines in more quickly (they are usually left overnight) and using types of hooks that do less damage to a fish's mouth. But to date longliners' main response to the bycatch problem has been finger-pointing, denial, and such imaginative arguments as insisting that indiscriminate fishing gear takes an "ecologically balanced" catch.

Top predators like swordfish are not good gamblers. They haven't evolved to deal with such wild cards as the sudden appearance of tens of millions of hooks in the world's seas. The beleaguered broadbill has drawn an unlucky hand: It is a big, rare, solitary predator that tastes great to people. But it has an ace in the hole, and it may yet come from behind and win. The same prolific spawning habits that led people to believe the gladiator was invincible could allow significant recovery within a decade, if the young fish do indeed get a break. Longlines have demolished Atlantic swordfish mainly because they interrupt the life cycle by catching large numbers of fish before they have a chance to breed. Protecting those fish by closing nursery areas to longlining remains a legally available -- though yet unchosen -- option. The U.S. controls major nurseries, and marlin and certain tuna species use some of the same areas, raising the possibility of multiple recoveries if the nurseries are protected.

Men once regularly harpooned swordfish within rowing distance of Montauk, Block Island, and Martha's Vineyard. In 1959 a government observer described a "typical day" on Georges Bank: The first swordfish showed itself before the engine was started in the morning, and the boat had taken 16 broadbills by late afternoon. The observer wrote, "Most of the fish were not finning but were sighted underwater. . . . Had they been finning, a far greater number of fish would have been seen." Those harpooners' way of life is gone, but some of them still pray for the resurrection of the giant swordfish and of their former livelihood. If we allow the small broadbills to grow up, "a far greater number of fish" could be seen again.