This October I was lucky to work as a representative of the Monterey Bay Aquarium alongside members from the Tag-A-Giant Foundation and Stanford University, to tag and release giant bluefin tuna in Nova Scotia. The Tag-A-Giant team has been working in the remote town of Port Hood on Cape Breton Island every fall for the past 8 years to deploy electronic tags that teach us about the migrations and feeding ecology of these magnificent (and increasingly rare) fish. The results of this intense research effort can be seen here in a recent publication by my colleague Dr. Steve Wilson.
Nova Scotia is known for its rough weather, and this October we saw 30-40 knot winds and 8 foot seas for days on end. Trust me, it's really hard to successfully tag and release a 1,000lb tuna with that much ocean motion! Even though this was a bummer from a research standpoint, it meant I had a lot of time to work on art projects back at the rental cabin!
There is an active commercial fishery for giant bluefin in this region; large tuna are regularly caught, packed in ice, and shipped next-day air to Tsukiji Market in Japan to supply high-end sushi restaurants. However, the fish are so big that they cut the tails and heads off to fit them in their cardboard coffins. The tails and heads are typically thrown away, but you know me... discarded materials are my thing!
I came prepared and brought some oversized rolls of rice paper and canvas, brushes, and jars of acrylic paint from California. I collected a discarded tail from a 1007lb bluefin and set to work filleting the tissue off the section of backbone as I wanted to achieve a skeletal look for the final print. Hours (and a gallon of bleach) later, I set up shop in the loft of the cabin and began the ancient Japanese process of gyotaku, or fishing rubbing.
I brushed acrylic paint evenly onto the fish tail and carefully laid a large sheet of rice paper over the tail (without smudging or spreading paint to the rest of the paper). I applied even pressure with a sponge, carefully stretching the paper around the contours of the fish, and voila! A gyotaku print from the tail of a ~25 year old giant bluefin tuna!
I made a number of these bluefin tail prints and I'm planning to donate any proceeds to the Tag-A-Giant Foundation so they can continue their conservation research efforts. It's only through longterm scientific surveys like this that we can actually understand bluefin populations well enough to create management models that effectively protect this species from overexploitation.
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