Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

Because of this, a comprehensive picture of the changes happening across generations never truly comes into focus. Scientists are concentrating on only part of a line graph that is, in fact, much longer and more steeply plunging. (We now know, for example, that between 1850 and 2005 overfishing reduced the cod population in the northwestern Atlantic by 92 percent.) As we began to fish bigger species like cod into scarcity, we transitioned to eating smaller ones, like monkfish. As Pauly puts it, humans are blindly fishing their way down the marine food web—not any differently from how entomologists blindly moved down the web of insects at Antioch Dunes, with Jerry Powell fascinated by the tiny bugs that his predecessors let pass through the mesh of their nets. When Pauly introduced the idea of shifting baselines syndrome in the nineties, he often joked to the press that kids might soon be enjoying jellyfish salad sandwiches, instead of tuna. These days, he points out that there actually is a commercial jellyfish fishing industry up and running in Asia and the American Southeast.