Over time, I realized the abused fishermen I talked to and the illegal fishing vessels they worked on were just one tiny part of a vast ecosystem. Looking at exploitation of the ocean required looking at the ocean itself—not as a passive backdrop, a canvas for bad behavior, but as a living organism in its own right, a creature that men and women skate across the surface of, like the sea lice that cling to the skin of a whale. It wasn’t enough for me to study the lice; I needed to understand the whale as well and how its parasitic passengers were making it sick.
