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Some facts about tuna, from Paul Greenberg's book, "Four Fish, The Future Of The Last Wild Food."
"Tuna are among the fastest, most powerful fish in the world. ... [Swimming] in excess of forty miles per hour ... they're faster than the fastest warships ever built."Just a magnificent creature. Look at the size of its head compared to a human's.
Tuna achieve this speed in part by "a weird slot, as hard and fixed as the landing-gear slot on an airplane, into which it retracts its dorsal fin."
And with "a slim crescent of tail, insignificant in size compared to most fish tails, [that] vibrates at astronomical speed while the rest of the body slips forward with barely any bend, pitch, or roll."
"Tuna can be extremely large - in excess of fourteen feet and fifteen hundred pounds."
"The biggest tuna are warm-blooded. ... [Tuna] can redirect the heat that its muscles throw off back into its very flesh and raise its body temperature by as much as twenty degrees above ambient conditions."
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Tuna are undoubtedly near the top of the marine food chain. That makes eating these large predators chancy. With a nod to bioaccumulation, Greenberg writes:
"It is the biggest, longest-living fish that tend to have the most mercury, and in the ocean it is harder to find a bigger, longer-living fish than the bluefin tuna."
Photo of bluefin tuna caught up in net from Wired.
1 comment:
Fascinating. I had no idea!
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