1869, Ep. 163 with Joe Meisel, author of The Marlin's Fiery Eye and Other Tales from the Extraordinary World of Marine Fishes

    4:12PM Apr 3, 2025

    Speakers:

    Jonathan Hall

    Joe Meisel

    Keywords:

    Marine fishes

    Joe Meisel

    conservation

    tropical ecology

    ocean resilience

    marine adaptations

    predator-prey dynamics

    deep-sea fishes

    guano trade

    marine protected areas

    sustainable fishing

    marine biodiversity

    ocean conservation

    marine ecosystems

    fish behaviors.

    Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Joe Meisel, author of the new book The Marlin's Fiery Eye and Other Tales from the Extraordinary World of Marine Fishes. Joe Meisel is a biologist, a conservationist and an educator. He is a co founder of the Ceiba Foundation for Tropical Conservation. We spoke to Joe about the fascinating behaviors, remarkable adaptations and complex life histories of the many species of salt water fishes, some of the present day and historical connections between humans and the sea and why, despite the many challenges our oceans face, there's reason to be optimistic about the future of our oceans and fishes. Hello, Joe, welcome to the podcast.

    Hello Jonathan. Thank you very much.

    And for the listeners who can't see, you are in a foreign location, you're in Ecuador, and through the miracle of Zoom talking to us, which is great, and we're here to talk about your new book, The Marlin's Fiery Eye and Other Tales from the Extraordinary World of Marine Fishes. Tell us the backstory to this book. How did it come to be?

    Yeah, thanks. I'm really happy to have an opportunity to say hi to all the listeners. I wish you could be with me here in sunny, leafy Ecuador, but you know, the sound will have to do Sure. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. I My background is as a tropical ecologist. I have done a lot of research in the tropics, mostly the New World tropics. Worked as an educator, Teaching study abroad programs and as a conservationist. And my background was mostly terrestrial ecology. My PhD was on army ants and birds in tropical forests. I have done research on monkeys and set up a lot of conservation projects in collaboration with partners in Ecuador but in the process of teaching, I teach a lot of study abroad programs with us students and some Ecuadorian programs as well. We started including a marine component. Everybody wanted to go to the Galapagos or go to coral reefs and places, and the more I started learning my own self about the ocean, the more I realize that it's just such a unique and cool environment. It's a place that is kind of unseen, you know, by all of us, there's this famous quote, or to me, it's famous quote by Dave Berry. You know, he was a, sort of a humorist columnist from Miami Herald. I think it was who said something like, when you just look at the surface of the ocean, you realize that you're missing the entire point. It's like going to the circus and just staring at the outside of the tent. And so I like that idea. And for me, it was just this peeling back of the curtain was so amazing, because all of the things that fascinated me about Tropical Ecology and forests, you know, predators chasing prey and things being camouflaged, and defenses and crazy adaptations and just cool life stories all happen underwater, but just not that many people know about it. You know, there's a few, a bunch of snorkelers in the world. There's fewer, you know, scuba divers. There's a bunch of fishers in the world, fishermen, Fisher women. But, you know, just not a lot of people know about it. So all the stories were just super fun, really unique. And the more I kind of started to fall in love with the ocean and teaching about it, the more I kind of wanted to tell other people about the stories that I've been finding. So the book sort of naturally grew out of that interest. That's

    great. That's great. I love that Dave Barry quote, yeah, we're just seeing the surface. And as land animals, we don't really get to interact that much. As you said. There's some people that, you know, scuba dive or snorkel or discuss swimming or fish. Most people's experience with, you know, marine fishes is just the dinner table, unfortunately. So so we don't really understand the oceans that well. And your book, you use the quote here you wanted to inspire in readers of fascination and joy and love for the fishes of the ocean. You definitely do that in spades. And so by us understanding fish is not just as something on a dinner plate, but more as wild animals with crazy, amazing lives. That's what your book sets out to do, and it does in a great way. So once readers, you know the end game is that once readers realize that cool creatures that fishes are, then they're going to be more likely to want to support them in conservation efforts and things like that. So tell us some of the amazing, crazy, bizarre, centric things that you discovered about the fishes and some of the fishes that you feature in the book?

    Yeah, sure, and I'm happy to and thanks for the kind words about the book. I mean, I guess I'll give away the mystery and the title, you know, right away that sort of, I should just tell everybody to read the book to figure it out, but that seems unfair to me, so I'll happy to pull back the curtain again. You know, one of the things that was just blew my mind. Mind was that you read about some of the big ocean predators. So Marlins are the ones that stand out, and they're the ones from which the title is pulled. But it happens in swordfish it happens in manta rays and some sharks too, that they dive deep into the ocean in order to catch prey that aren't just hanging around at the surface. The prey feel a little bit more safe in the dark and it's cold down there. So these fishes dive down and just like you and me diving into cold water, we don't want to stay there very long, they don't either. So they kind of come up and get back to the surface while they're down low. It's this interesting evolutionary race between how camouflage and difficult to see are the prey fish and how good are the eyes of the fishes that are trying to find them, you know? And if you took a picture, you know, of a garden and you were looking for flowers, and your camera was four pixels, you know, just four big squares, you wouldn't be able find any flowers, right? So resolution matters, but the other thing that matters is what's called flicker rate. And a flicker rate is basically like, how fast does your image refresh, like a fish sprinting across your vision? Does it? Do you catch one image of it, or do you catch 10 images of it? You know, kind of like a movie camera at high speed or not. And if a fish has a warm eye, its flicker detection rate is much higher. And so a Marlin literally has like a heating blanket that wraps around the back of the eye. It pumps hot blood straight from the heart to the back of the eye. Can raise the eye by a lot, like, I think it's more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and it warms the eye up, and that increases that flicker rate. So all of a sudden, the fish is now able to be seen in like, by a high resolution, like the kind of cameras they use to figure out if a football touchdown actually happened in the NFL, you know, inch by inch, and then boom, this fish running across can still be seen in like spectacular detail, and it allows Marlins and swordfish to chase after them and be able to catch them, even in the near dark.

    That's amazing. It's like a slow motion camera in the eye. Yeah, exactly. And

    fish, there are other fish that dive that deep, that don't have that and so they have to rely on some other things, and they're not nearly as successful or sensitive about it. Wow.

    Super cool. All right, that's you started off with a bang. Let's hear some more. Here's some more crazy stories of fish.

    Um, let's see. I mean, one of the, I think, always the fun places, especially like the back to this idea of Dave Berry, you know, we're mostly looking at the surface. Even people who get in the water are only looking at the top, you know, maybe 100 feet. Like, if you're really nutsy, you scuba dive down to 300 or 400 if you're, you know, working, I don't know, in commercial diving. But then that's the whole rest of the ocean. There's another 25,000 feet of ocean that you're basically never going to and when you get into the deep the abyssal zone, like just at the edge of where there's no light at all, or below, then everything goes completely nuts. And if we could hang around there, you would just, you would have all day long, just going, Wow, look at that weird thing. So everybody mostly knows about angler fish. You know, these were made famous in Finding Nemo and a lot of things. It's the lumpy kind of frog looking, football looking fish with the little stalk off the top of the head that dangles in front of it and usually has a little illuminated part at the end, that's called the ESCA, which is packed, actually, with little dinoflagellates, little bioluminescent algae that kind of live in there. But anyway, it makes this bright blue light blues real common as the bioluminescent color under the water, and that's attracting mostly prey. You know, little fish will kind of wander by the front and then the fish, you know, co op. So that's story that everybody you know mostly knows. But because you're in the dark and it's extremely difficult to cruise around and find prey, but also to find partners in the dark. Fishes do a lot of other things. And so angler fish release really powerful pheromones, so everywhere around them in the water, this perfume, you know, Chanel Number fish, or whatever, is spreading around in the water. And so males start to find this. So what do the males look like? Well, nobody really knew, and people started going back and looking at some of the captured specimens that they had, you know, they just catch them in these deep water submersibles, and then they bring them up. And because of the pressure changes, they kind of collapse and look all funky. But they were looking at them and they're, like, a bunch of these fish have, like, weird little parasites on the outside, sometimes one, sometimes two, just a little blob, you know, like this, the size that, like a slug would be on you, you know, really tiny. And the more they start looking at the more they figured it out. Basically, what happens those are the males. And what happens is, they smell the pheromone. They get attracted to the female to mate. They literally latch on to the side of the female. They kind of grasp on with their mouth, and then they dissolve the outside of the female in this little spot. Their circulatory systems actually fuse, so the blood from the female and the male are now mixing. So it's just completely this blood sucking parasite, you know, feeding off of her blood normally, you know, like in humans, if you have an organ graph. Like histocompatibility complexes and your T cells would cause a rejection, but in anglerfish, that's all suppressed, so they don't reject each other, so the male just hangs on there. They have found some of them with as many as eight of these parasitic copulatory males just attached to the outside, and then when the female is ready, then her hormones change. That stimulates the male, because they're sharing the same blood supply. They both release sperm and eggs into the water, and then that's how fertilization happens. So like, imagine that as a sort of a terrestrial form of like, courtship and reproduction. Yeah.

    I mean, that that's their idea of romance is very different than ours,

    right? I don't know where the room is for the you know, for the little violinist, but,

    yeah, wow, wow. That is very that's something out of, you know, science fiction. It sounds so different looking at and then

    those deep waters, I mean, they're just full of all these kinds of things. So, you know, for example, like when you get pretty deep, the light starts to fade, obviously. So you get 100 you know, 100, maybe 300 feet down, light starts to fade, but you can still see the tiniest bit of light for about 1000 feet. Sometimes 3000 feet depends on where you are. And if you think about, like, if you've ever been out at night, you know, just when it's almost pitch black, and then, like, maybe a flock of birds, or like some geese fly overhead, or something like that, and you look up, and basically, you can just barely see the sky is a little bit lighter, and, you know, maybe it's like an hour after sunset and you see this black silhouette kind of pass overhead. Bats do this too. That's how some fishes underwater search for prey. They go around just where it's dark enough that they can look up and see this silhouette above them, and then they go and they hunt it, right? So then it raises. It poses this evolutionary question, like, how do you swim around, looking up all the time? And they started catching this other fish in some of these deep water things that's called a barrel eye. And when they looked at they're like, it's weird. It's got these two little puckered eyes in the front of the of the head. And the head is real smooth, and we don't know what's going on. When they dissected it. The little puckered parts in the front were nostrils, and it had no external eyes at all. They're like, Well, okay, how does this thing work? You know? And when they when they were dissecting, them open inside the head, which is this big bulbous head. It's kind of got like a Charlie Brown looking head. It has these two barrels, like imagine soda cans, although they're not that big, that are inside the head, in their eyes, and they're pointing straight up as the fish is swimming horizontally, and they have no opening to the outside, so the forehead is completely transparent tissue. So if you shine a light through, you can see through the head of this thing, and these two barrels that are sitting there, like, like twin, you know, telescopes, right, looking up. And so they just swim around super slow, and they look for that silhouette. And then when they see it, then they can, they tilt themselves up. They go get it. They can actually take those barrels, and they can then rotate them down 90 degrees, so they're facing forward. Now they're seeing out the transparent front of the bot of the head, and then they can catch prey that way. So, you know, again, this absolutely bizarre and cool adaptation that doesn't really have any kind of parallel in the terrestrial world. That's

    amazing. That's amazing. It reminds me of, like a chameleon, how they can move their eyes in different ways.

    Yeah, right. Yeah. Very much. So, except in this case, the chameleons eyes are inside the head. Yeah, translucent

    head. That is amazing. So, yeah. So you cover these incredibly interesting fish. They're all interesting. But I'll just for the audience list some of the other ones that you cover as well, anchovy, sardines and herrings, tuna sharks and rays, whale sharks and other giants. You look at life on the coral reef, weird and wonderful, where horses swim, you know, and bats walk, pod haddock, Pollock and halibut. They're then mentioned, into the abyss, the barrel eyes trip, pod fish and more. Tarpon. What else? See? Eel, salmon and Ale wives. Those are just to name a few that you cover. So there's a lot of different creatures that you cover.

    And, I mean, you know, there's, there's 35,000 species of fish in the ocean, and so the idea that I would try to somehow cover all of them, you know, and it's not an identification book. I mean, for people that aren't first seeing it right now, it's a textbook. I mean, it's a book full of texts. It's not a textbook for students. It's written for anybody. But I tried to cluster fishes into groups that behave similarly. So the little ones, sardines and anchovies and herring, they're all small, little fish that move in huge schools. So that makes a nice chapter in the way that they interact with their world and how they try to avoid predation and stuff, we might come back to them. And then, you know, you mentioned, like sharks and rays, that's a very different lineage has a lot of similarities. They're, you know, old. I mean, that's some of the sharks are a design that's existed in the ocean for almost 400 million years. You know, you talked about some of the coastal stuff, like tarpon and things that inhabit. And Sargassum sea and kelp forests and things like that. So I try to cluster fishes into these groups that make them a little bit more, I don't know, dare I say, digestible, but, you know, I mean in an intellectual sort of way, that they're understandable, because a lot there, even though there's lots of species that a lot of them behave really similarly, and that's what I'm really interested in, like, what makes these things cool? What are their interactions? What are their crazy behaviors? What are their weird eyes and transparent foreheads? Doing that kind of stuff is what I find really cool. And so hopefully the readers will enjoy that too. Oh

    yeah, yeah, no. I mean, you're a great storyteller. I mean, it's very obvious just talking to within a few minutes, you have an ability to create interesting stories, and you have some interesting characters, all these fish, but you're able to spin a tale that's that's really interesting, and it makes the subject matter come alive. And you start off the book mentioning the attack of the Essex and Captain Pollard that the basically the subject of Moby Dick. And obviously that's a whale, not a fish, but the fish come into the story. And I had no idea that they would, because they're, they were in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, you would think, okay, now they can survive on fish. This is after, you know, the boat gets destroyed, and they're in their, you know, emergency life rafts at the time. But because they were in the Pacific Ocean, there wasn't any plankton there, and no algae, like you're talking about the food chain and how it's important for for marine life, and you had this quote that they were stranded in the marine equivalent of the Sahara Desert. That's such an interesting idea. Most people think there's fish all over the place. And if you're in the middle of the ocean and it's sunny, okay, you'll be able to get some fish. Not the case. Tell us more about this. Yeah,

    you know, I think that people have a sense that oceans are really productive, that there's lots of fish out there we certainly get. I mean, I think the take is something like 100 million tons every year. So that's 200 billion pounds of fish every year, which is a phenomenal amount of protein to pull out of the oceans. But it's really not evenly distributed. So if that ship had sunk near the coast of Peru or California, I mean, they could have practically walked to shore on the backs of the fish that are there because they're so numerous. But as you say, there are these big parts of the ocean. Basically the entire Southern Pacific, from the equator to getting pretty close to the polar waters is this huge desert where there's very little productivity. There's just not a lot of food for fish. There's not a lot of tiny food for tiny fish, and then there's no tiny fish for big fish, and so on and so forth and so there just really isn't much out there. It's really pretty wild. You have this huge parts of the ocean that are relatively empty. I mean, if you get down to a bacterial level, it's different. But from a fishing perspective, and fishing boats don't really go there either, except sometimes tracking like schools of tuna that are moving through. But, you know, you compare that to like anybody that's ever been on a coral reef, for example, you know, the soon as you put your head in the water, there's just fish everywhere, you know. So there, the contrast couldn't be more different, that they're super bright and colorful, really diverse and abundant on coral reefs, and yet, you know, almost absent from these big, giant, empty areas of the ocean.

    Nice, nice. So in that line, as far as connections between humans and the sea. What are some of the other present day or historical connections that you found between humans and the sea that you uncovered in your research? Oh,

    yeah, it's so much fun. I mean, in learning to tell about the fish, I as a biologist, I focused a lot on the biology, what they do, what their interactions with the world are. But I mean, the connections to history are profound, because people have been living, you know, near water for pretty much ever. I mean, there's a whole theory called the aquatic ape hypothesis that suggests that we learned how to feed by wading around in marshes rather than walking around in prairies. And it's quite well known that seafood, a seafood diet with omega threes, and these kinds of things, really promotes mental health. And there's pretty good evidence that some of the earliest of strong, complex human cultures mostly developed in places where there was abundant seafood. So southern shores of South Africa, Western northwestern coast of North America. You know, there's this idea that that seafood diet probably helped proto humans to form the nerve, the brain, complexity enough to become like modern day humans. So that's almost an aside. I mean, that's just that just, there's a ton of super interesting stuff. I mean, to stay with the Pacific, though, like we said, if, if Captain Pollard had been shipwrecked, 1500 miles, say, 2000 miles to the east, he would have been right off the shores of Peru. And if he had been there, that is literally one of the richest places for seafood on the entire planet. Like the number one catch on planet Earth is a little fish called an anchoveta. We know them as anchovies. You know, people think about them as putting them on pizza. And like. Think three quarters of pizza buyers don't like anchovies, but it's a really abundant fish. More Weight of anchovies are caught every year than any other fish on the planet. And it happens there, because near the coast, the water is really, really rich. You have an upwelling. There's a lot of oxygen, there's a lot of nutrients, cold water. So there's this huge abundance, and that abundance feeds people. There's been anchovy fishers there for a long time, but it also feeds sea birds and sea lions and all kinds of other stuff. And those sea birds, for millennia had been feeding in the water, eating these fish and then taking them back to their nests and defecating and building up these piles of guano that reach like 100 feet in height. I mean, they're literally these little flat islands that now have this giant cone head top on it that's like 100 feet high, right? So, famous Natural History historian Alexander von Humboldt was around there in 1802 1802 and 18 five or whatever, and got some samples of this stuff, which the indigenous people called guano from a quiche, a word for fertilizer, or that which fertilizes, and he sent it back to England. And chemists in England are looking at this and like, oh my gosh, this is really rich in nitrogen. So by 1830 or 1840 they're starting to ship sacks of this back to Liverpool. There's records of like five sacks arriving in 1836 in Liverpool, and all of a sudden it happens where you have a continent that was kind of in crisis, because human populations are booming, agricultural productivity is going down, and you suddenly have this risk of starvation all across Europe. And then sort of to the rescue comes the poop of like 10 billion South American sea birds and these teeny little fish that they're eating, and all of a sudden, it's this giant trade in fertilizer that comes from South America. So it hits at just the right time. By the 1850s there's 1000s and 1000s of tons of this stuff being imported every year. And they would go to these islands and with like, big saws, just slice giant blocks, like the size of a dining table out of these islands, and then stick it on a boat and send it off to, uh, to mostly England, but lots of places in Europe, and then, so it seems to carry on a little bit. So then this whole story with guano is awesome, right? Because So then you've got all this stuff going on, all this and America, then is, like, we should get in on this guano thing. And I think it's in 1856 the Senate declare, or maybe it's the president declares the guano Act, which basically says, if an American finds an uninhabited island anywhere in the world that has a bunch of guano on it, you can just claim it to be America. They were so key, you know, on the that's like, oh, yeah, sure, just go find an island with a bunch of bird pod and let's call that, you know, America

    part three, or whatever that is, counts for Greenland most recently,

    yes, perhaps, you know, I'm sure they have large deposits there as well. So okay, so this is all happening. So then guano becomes, you know, it becomes investigated by chemists. And, you know, there's all this chemistry society going on. So remember, guano is coming from these fishes that all have very silvery scales, and their eyes have some adaptations to seeing in the dark, and they're loaded with a chemical compound which had not been discovered then called guanine, the name of which comes from guano. So guanine is now discovered 1845 or something like that, from from this guano. And it gets called essan story on or basically essence of Pearl, because you can make artificial Pearl looking colors out of it, so buttons and things like that. So it starts being synthesized. It's still we use it today, like when you have shampoo, and it has that kind of pearly shine to it. Same thing for nail polish, that's guanine. So it's still used to this day, and you go a little bit further along. And by the time that Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin kind of really unravel the story of DNA, one of the four base pairs in DNA is guanine that comes from that thing. So the narrative arc of this thing is just awesome, because you have like an explorer that discovers this stuff in 1802 and then by the time Watson and Crick come, we just here, we just here, we come to discover that this lowly, you know, compound that gets squirted out of a bird's butt, you know, in the middle of the South or the the South America now, is like one quarter of the alphabet that the entire story of life is written with in the world.

    Oh, my gosh, that's, that's, a great story. Remind there was a BBC show called connections. I don't know if you knew about this. They would take something from like the from the Middle Ages, and then bring it up to where we are now. And your story is, it's just like that. This is as great. That's great, yeah.

    I mean, so I personally, I just, I absolutely adore stories like that. And then every time they kind of come up, you know, in the in the book, I mean, you know, Captain Cook gets poisoned by a puffer fish. You know that he doesn't know what's happening. Things like this, they're always just so interesting to me. So I I kept bothering my editors by packing more stories into the book. Fantastic.

    That's fantastic. Yeah, it's for the general reader. And there's so many great stories like that. So thanks so much for sharing them. So. Final, final question I have, you know, we don't have to look too far, looking at the headlines in the news, the oceans are a little bit of trouble or a lot in trouble. And what I thought was interesting is that you're optimistic. You have a you say, you have a spirit of informed optimism, showing how resilient our oceans can be in the current crisis. Tell us the reason behind your optimism?

    Yeah, thank you. I mean, I've been a conservationist working in the tropical America for almost 30 years now, and I think in some ways, without a sense of optimism, it's even hard to just move forward. But I also believe that that, that I that this info, as you say, this informed optimism, is really quite real. You know, one of the things that drew me to the to the oceans, that's widely commented on by lots of authors, is that the oceans are incredibly resilient. And to draw the CO I work in rain forest a lot, but to draw the comparison to rain forest, you know, the biggest problem for rainforest is deforestation, right? So you cut the forest down, and basically, as soon as you cut it down and turn it into, you know, cattle pasture or banana plantations or whatever you're making, then all the toucans, all the Jaguars, all of the giant armadillos, all the monkeys, they all disappear, absolutely gone from that location. But in the ocean, it's extremely difficult to kind of exterminate the last individual, even if you're catching really high price bluefin tuna. I mean, some of these sell for more than a million dollars of fish to catch the very last one is eventually just becomes economically impossible. And the equivalent, say, of deforestation is like trawling, where they take these big nets that are dragged on the sea floor. It's excellent for catching fish that hang out near the sea floor, like cod, but it also does a tremendous amount of damage to the floor. It breaks up all the rocks, the hiding places, the nesting grounds and things like that. That said, if you leave that ocean floor for a relatively short period of time, we're talking about years or 10s of years, it recuperates really quickly. And by comparison, the rainforest, you have to wait, poof a couple 100 years before you get back to where you're going to have jaguars and monkeys and stuff like that. So so in that sense, there's an optimism for me that says, As long as we can establish some places where we're not exerting a lot of continuous damage into the oceans, they have shown repeatedly, the ability to recover. You know quite well, and and we have been doing that, we've been declaring marine protected areas. There's more than 11,000 Marine Protected Areas declared as people become more aware of the necessity of protecting the ocean that covers more than 100,000 square miles of protected area growing every year. So So resiliency is, I think the first, you know, big part, the second big part has to do really with fisheries. And I think when people think about the oceans and think about the problems you know that we're seeing there, it's because of, you know, this understanding of declining fish populations and and so I tried to make it apparent in my in the book that, you know, that people that fish are, that's a, really, it's a it's a great job. These are people that are really, it's a noble profession that goes back, you know, several 1000 years. I interview a fishing boat captain, Megan Corazza from from Alaska, and talk about her experiences. And, you know, I think it's worth remind remembering that, that there are real people out there, running real boats, having real jobs and putting themselves at risk. I mean, that's one of the most dangerous professions on planet Earth, and yet to feed, you know, a lot of people. And like I said, there's something like 200 billion pounds of seafood that have been produced, you know, for the last bunch of years now, are we at the maximum? Yes, and are some places over fished? Yes. But I think it's also pretty clear that the solutions are really, you know, within our grasp. And I write a lot about solutions that various people have suggested, the implementation of those solutions has already made things considerably better. I mean, the fish stocks have rebounded from the 1970s where only about 10% of fisheries in the 1970s were sustainable stocks, but that number is about 65% now, and something like 80% of all seafood landings by mass I think it is come from stable stocks. So this is not to say that everything is great, but that we have been making progress. The real low point was in the 1970s and we've been making progress. And I think the fact that the oceans are resilient, that people are becoming more aware of the oceans, and that the solutions are really right out there, they're not that complicated, means that, you know, with the application of will and public pressure, we can really get to a place where the oceans are providing jobs, providing food and still sustaining healthy fish populations.

    Well, that's great news. And so you know, because there's a sense of, for many people, a sense of dread that mankind is kind of messing things up and the environment is going down. And there's no way out. But this is such good news to hear how resilient the oceans are. And if we just leave managed fisheries, if we just leave them alone, as you said, for years or maybe a couple of decades, they bounce back very well. So that is such good news, and it also helps reading about these stories of the fish that they're going to be around for a long time, and you have so many entertaining stories in your book. I strongly encourage anyone listening to this podcast to pick up Joe's new book, The Marlin's Fiery Eye and Other Tales from the Extraordinary World of Marine Fishes. Thank you so much, Joe for coming to us live from Ecuador and telling us some of your amazing stories of these fish.

    Yeah. Thanks very much, Jonathan. I really appreciate the opportunity. And you know, as one of my friends that works with little kids in marine education down here says, you know, you really, you can't get people to protect something until they learn to love it. So I think that's sort of been the motivation is, you know, fish give you a lot to love. And so I think there's a there's a fish in this book for almost anybody to fall in love with.

    Nice, nice. Well said, well said, Excellent. But thanks so much for joining us. And congratulations again on the new book, my

    pleasure. And thank you very much. That was

    Joe misel, author of the new book The Marlin's Fiery Eye and Other Tales from the Extraordinary World of Marine Fishes. You can purchase Joe's new book at our website, at Cornell press.cornell.edu, and use the promo code 09 pod to save 30% off if you live in the UK. Use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you For listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast. You