S6. E4: Jonathan Balcombe: What A Fish Knows
“…gazing up to the night sky saying, ‘are we alone?’ …well, wait a minute, look around, there's tons of fascinating life forms. We're so lucky to have all this amazing panoply of life on the planet.
I get the question… are there other humanoids out there? Or, are there other conscious beings? But we ought to be pretty grateful for what we have on this planet… there's a lot of amazing creatures and phenomena that we get to enjoy living with, if we can.”
- Jonathan Balcombe
Jonathan Balcombe is a biologist with a Ph.D. in ethology, the study of animal behavior. He is the author of four books on the inner lives of animals, including the New York Times bestseller, What a Fish Knows. He has published over 60 scientific papers and book chapters on animal behavior and animal protection.
Jonathan has spent his life studying animals, how they think and feel, and why they matter. Quite often, he focuses on the ones that most of us tend not to think about very much, like fish and in his newest book, flies – Super Fly comes out in May.
I thought I knew a little bit about fish, but after reading Jonathan’s book and after this time spent with him, I realized that I knew very little. There are 33,000 species of fish and what many of them are capable of is absolutely mind-blowing .
For eons, we have categorized species by who we deem worthy and who we don’t. Fish are almost always very near or at the bottom of that list. Clearly, that is because most of us know so little about them. Jonathan knows a lot. If you haven’t read his book, read it. It will astonish you.
Jonathan can most recently be seen in the Netflix documentary, Seaspiracy.
Visit Jonathan’s Website
Read Jonathan’s Books
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Transcript:
Jonathan: [00:00:15] Gazing up to the night sky, saying, are we alone? It's like, well, wait a minute, look around. There's tons of fascinating lifeforms. We're so lucky to have all this amazing panoply of life on the planet. It's not to say I get the question, you know, OK? There are other humanoids out there, or there are other conscious beings. But we ought to be pretty grateful for what we have on this planet. There's a lot of amazing creatures and phenomena that we get to enjoy living with. If we can.
Elizabeth: [00:00:50] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask, if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Jonathan Balcombe. Jonathan is a biologist with a PhD in Ethology, the Study of Animal Behavior. He's the author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller, What a Fish Knows, and he can be seen in the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy. Hi Jonathan, thank you so much for being here today. It's awesome to have you on the show.
Jonathan: [00:01:52] Great to be here, Beth. Thanks.
Elizabeth: [00:01:54] Hey, so I want to talk about fish because all the rage at the moment is seaspiracy. Congratulations on your part in it. I thought you were fantastic.
Jonathan: [00:02:04] It's an honor to be part of that film, given that it's trending so much.
Elizabeth: [00:02:08] The film is everywhere, and it's in the top 10.
Jonathan: [00:02:11] Is it? I didn't know that, it's good to hear.
Elizabeth: [00:02:12] Yeah, in 40 countries. My only qualm was your part. I loved your part, but I wanted more.
Jonathan: [00:02:15] You're sweet.
Elizabeth: [00:02:20] No, I did. Because it's this film bringing us all this concern about what we're doing to the oceans and to fish. But we need to know more about the fish themselves, the individuals. So the films are incredible, and you are the man who knows a lot about fish being that you wrote What A Fish Knows. Before we even start with that, Jonathan, I want to talk a little about you because you know so much about so many animals, how they think, feel, why they matter. You've been doing this for a really long time and so did you grow up with this level of compassion and concern? Was this part of who you were as a kid?
Jonathan: [00:03:01] Yeah. Well, first off, credit to the scientists who do the research that I synthesize. I don't do animal studies directly anymore, although I love observing them and I certainly do a lot of that. But you know, they do some creative and remarkable stuff that I like to bring to light in my books. Yeah, this topic's been with me my whole life. From my earliest memory I absolutely adored animals. As a kid if somebody squashed a caterpillar or an ant under their foot, I felt more alienated from them by far than I did the little creature that they crushed. That was with me from the earliest memory, so it was probably only a matter of time before ‘A’ studied biology and ‘B’ I went into animal protection as sort of my career for the next couple of decades before I started focusing more and more on writing books.
Elizabeth: [00:03:47] When did you go vegan?
Jonathan: [00:03:48] In 1989 I stopped buying all animal products, in 84 I went vegetarian, and at that time I was amazed that it took me that long to come to that realization, given how much passion I have for animals. Then 89, I thought, you know, if I'm vegetarian, well, they still slaughter the animals that we take milk from and eggs from. Or I should say who we take those things from. So their life is no better and arguably worse to be morally and ethically consistent. It made so much more sense to stop buying eggs and milk. Of course, I buy tons of milk, but it's just not made from cows or goats, it's made from plants. It's nice to have those options now. So, yeah, 89. I sort of called myself a domestic vegan for a while. There was a sort of a transitional period where I would still go to a restaurant or go to someone's place and not ask them if they'd put cream in the dessert or what have you. In time, I worked for organizations that took a more of a strident stance on that and it made sense. As I say, it's become a lot easier anyway to be vegan now. It's very easy and it still has the stigma of being challenging, but it's a stigma that's not deserved.
Elizabeth: [00:04:56] Yeah, no, it's true. But it's now, I'm sure, compared to back in the day when you first went vegan. I mean, there's no comparison.
Jonathan: [00:05:03] Oh, no comparison at all.
Elizabeth: [00:05:05] You got your PhD in Ethology, which is a study of animal behavior. Was Ethology a big thing and were many people really looking at the actual lives of animals and the culture, the thinking and the feeling and kind of how they how they matter.
Jonathan: [00:05:22] Yeah, go ask someone if they know what ethology is and you'll soon find that very few people do know what it is, which is one way of saying that it's not. It hasn't been a big field. It's been a growing field. It's an exciting time to be an Ethologist now because scientists are asking questions about what animals are thinking, what are they feeling, questions that we're not being asked for most or certainly much of the 20th century. It was actually a taboo on suggesting that animals had minds and feelings. It was a strange, strange sort of denialist era. But for the last several decades, science has been emerging from that, and now we have all kinds of fascinating studies about animal emotions. My new book, Superfly, which is about to come out, there's even a study I describe in there asking the question: Do to male fruit flies enjoy ejaculating? Who would have thought of that even asking that question a while ago. Never mind probing that kind of question. It's not to say we necessarily have definitive answers, and by the way, there's some interest in studying the potential for female pleasure in flies as well, which I think is very important. We have an even playing field there, so to speak.
Elizabeth: [00:06:30] I can't even imagine how someone would study this. After you wrote What A Fish Knows did you come out of it with this whole new kind of respect for fish?
Jonathan: [00:06:41] Yeah, one way I like to put it that kind of gelled for me while I was researching and writing this book was, I had some prejudices, I had some biases like we all do in various domains, and certainly that included this sense that that fishes were, you know, a little bit maybe more primitive or less sophisticated than the other vertebrates. Having seen what we've studied about them and what we've discovered about them, came to realize that they are equals among vertebrates. We tend to be hierarchical in our thinking. I don't even like to sort of encourage that way of thinking that one's above another or below another. Each species on Earth has its own wonderful attributes, and we should respect them all. If we are going to think hierarchically, then my conclusion is that fishes are, based on their attributes and their achievements, the ones that we've described, and there's probably many more that we haven't. Based on those they are equals among all the terrestrial vertebrates you want to name I mean, mammals, birds, fishes do stuff that's just as sophisticated. It's in a different realm. So maybe we can't relate to it as easily often. But if you probe deeply, they're doing really remarkable things through their communication, emotions, virtuous behavior, how they reproduce, how they find mates, how they solve problems, how they can learn by observation, learning and memory. They have great learning and memory. These are generalizations in the sense that not every one of those 33,000 species has a fabulous memory and can form a mental map. It may not be useful to them. They may not need to. Animals tend to be good at what's useful to them. But if you look at a species for which having a mental map is useful, you find that some of them have very good mental map ability, which is a form of memory.
Elizabeth: [00:08:28] A lot has changed and a lot is changing, but I guess there are still people who don't believe that fish feel pain. Is that true?
Jonathan: [00:08:34] Yeah. I suppose it's a more common view in the camp of those who catch fish, either for a living or for recreation. But there's good science on that. There's anatomical studies, there's physiological studies to show the same kind of biochemistry. There are studies that show that fishes have the same kind of nose receptors, which are nerve cells that are responsive to various kinds of insults, such as chemical insult, chemical pain, dare I say, heat pain and mechanical pain, such as something that pierces the skin. They have those three kinds of nose receptors that we have and when those nose receptors are stimulated through presumably painful stimulus, the brain registers that behavior changes, the animals remember it, fishes will seek pain relieving drugs if they are presumably in pain. The challenge here, of course, Beth is that we can't feel the pain of another. I can't feel your pain and you can't feel mine. Being humans we can report verbally that we feel pain and we accept that, and we can relate more easily with another human than another species, never mind a fish where we've often not been able to recognize how they're feeling. But you can study it's not often very humane type research, I'm not claiming that, but these studies show that these animals are equipped to feel pain, which we certainly expect them to be able to. Because pain is a very useful ability, it's a way to learn to avoid dangerous things. It can take you out of the gene pool. So evolution, natural selection for pain detection is not surprisingly, it's evolved. They have the physiology and the behavior that really lines up well with the experience of pain.
Elizabeth: [00:10:11] When you decided I want to write a book about fish and what we actually know now about fish, that scientists know, but most people haven't even thought about it. Did you go in knowing a lot of this or was there a ton that just shocked you, fascinated you and changed you?
Jonathan: [00:10:29] Mostly the latter. I mean, I knew some. I mean, I love animals. I've been reading about them all my life and you learn as you go. But for me, when I started to research that book, I was delighted to see how much there was and how little I knew even. I figured if I don't know much about it as somebody who studies animals and who reads a lot more about them than the average layperson, the potential reader of a book about the lives of fishes is not going to know either. The fact that we had a lot of really great science about these animals. The fact that few people were aware of what science shows us and the fact that we, as we exploit the animal that we're talking about. In this case, over 33,000 species of fish. Those three are the key criteria for me to want to study and write a book.
Elizabeth: [00:11:16] I thought I knew a little bit about fish until I read your book, and I realized I knew nothing. It stunned me and first of all, I had no idea that fish have all the same senses that we have. I had no idea that they could smell. They have more than us, too. Will you talk about that?
Jonathan: [00:11:32] Yeah, I mean, perhaps it follows from a group of animals who've been evolving for over 400 million years. If you compress the amount of time that humans have been on the earth down to a second, then fishes have been around for about four and a half minutes. So they've had a lot more time to evolve sophisticated systems. Living in the water gives you opportunities to have different ways of communicating. So yeah, they do have some cool sensory systems that we don't have, the lateral line of bony fishes, which is most fishes. It's a row of sensitive scales along their sides. You can actually see this line along many species, and it's these sensitive scales that have little pits in them, and there's little hair like structures that are innovated and they respond to changes in water pressure. They respond to movements. So even in the dark, a fish can detect movements nearby and they can use that information really well. There's quite a few species that have electric communication. There's certainly an electric sense. There are fishes in both South America and Africa, different groups of different species that evolved probably separately, which is pretty cool. They use electricity for communication. This is very useful when you live in murky environments where you can't see what's going on. A lot of the communication that fishes have with each other is kind of off the radar for other animals in the realm. So it's handy if a little fish can communicate with another one without alerting a nearby predator that they're actually talking to each other.
Elizabeth: [00:12:55] Wow. Humans in general have a really hard time giving fish any credit whatsoever for anything, right? I mean, the fact that they feel pain is very new for most people. You know, the past decade or so, probably so many people write fish off. I know so many people who say I'm vegetarian, but I eat fish and I'm like, Well, they’re an animal.
Jonathan: [00:13:14] The last time I looked at a fish it was not a vegetable, I believe.
Elizabeth: [00:13:16] Exactly. I would assume one reason is because they're farther away from us, than mammals or cows are.
Jonathan: [00:13:25] Sure.
Elizabeth: [00:13:26] But it's almost like, the way we've written off fish forever and given them, not a whole lot of thought and not a lot of moral consideration, not a lot of anything. It's made it really easy, how many fish are killed a year? I don't know if you know off the top of your head.
Jonathan: [00:13:41] Yeah, they're measured by weight, so you know you can only make estimates. But the estimates range anywhere from a low end of several hundred billion a year to a high end, possibly as much as two trillion. I describe that in my book, if you took an average fish and then you line them up end to end, that row of fish would reach the sun and back with a few hundred million to spare. This is the upper end if it was a trillion fish, and that's per year. Of course, it's so easy to forget that they're individuals with feelings. Feelings are felt not by species, but by individuals. Everyone's a unique individual with a personality, and, as we said, with the capacity to feel pain and to suffer, but also to enjoy life and to have joy and pleasure and that's important to keep that in the equation.
Elizabeth: [00:14:28] Do they feel pleasure?
Jonathan: [00:14:30] For sure, yeah. There is a combination of science and anecdote, that a lot of fishes will approach trusted humans and you can watch this on YouTube, who come in for petting for being handled and held. They'll even trust their human guardian to pick them up out of the water and hold them and caress them for a few minutes. So a lot of that is anecdotal, but the behavior is pretty hard to deny that this is an animal who is drawn to pleasure. There are, however, scientific studies that support this. For instance, a study that I like to describe using surgeon fishes. It's a reef species. They captured a bunch of them from the Great Barrier Reef, and I'm happy to say they returned them after the study to the same places. They found that a stressed, which is to say, probably unhappy fish will gravitate to a source of pleasure. That is to say, in this case, it was a model of a cleaner wrasse that was hooked up to a motor that would wave back and forth gently and they could get caressed from this. This actually matches an interaction that happens on the reef when cleaner wrasse do actually caress fishes with their pectoral fins, probably to curry favor with their so-called clients, for these interactions, they have. These stressed fishes, surgeon fish would swim up to this one an average of 15 times an hour and get caressed and they can measure the stress hormones in the blood and the stress levels came down towards baseline during that period, that hour to two hour period. The control group, who were stressed and were put in a tank with a model of a cleaner wrasse that was not hooked up to a motor, so it didn't wave back and forth. It just sat there stationary. They ignored it. They didn't go up to it because it couldn't give them caresses and their stress levels stayed high. I don't know about you, but I mean, I can hardly imagine a more convincing way of demonstrating that a massage feels good and or relieves stress for a fish. We already know it does that for us. I mean, when I read about that study, I already appreciate fish's capabilities. Nevertheless, my mind was blown to discover that it's kind of sobering when you consider how many fish we abuse every year.
Elizabeth: [00:16:33] Well, and with thirty three thousand different types of fish in the ocean or more than that?
Jonathan: [00:16:38] Yeah, by the way, most of which we never lay hands on there, fortunately, largely free of our depredations, although maybe I should regret saying that. But some of the deep sea species are probably not greatly affected by us yet, and let's hope it stays that way.
Elizabeth: [00:16:50] That's awesome. There's so many individual fish that have very specific evolutionary traits. Reading your book it's kind of like shocking fact after shocking fact. What do we know about their intelligence?
Jonathan: [00:17:04] Quite a bit, but probably a tiny fraction of what they know about their intelligence. There's a lot of examples I'd like to give. Certainly, the way animals communicate is a good window into what's going on in their minds. One example I love to give, again it was kind of mind blowing when I discovered it. It's an example of referential communication, which is vanishingly rare between species in nature, in any group of animals. It happens between two reef predator fishes called groupers, which are kind of big, chunky fishes that swim in the open water near the reef, and they can swim very fast and catch smaller fish to eat them. And moray eels, which are eels long and slender but also quite large predators of reefs. The grouper in this case will signal to the Moray that he or she would like to go hunting with them. It's essentially an invitation. It's a head shake or a body shimmy, and it communicates to the Moray and it's not any old Moray, it's probably Joe, the more who they happen to know personally and have collaborated with before, and it's an invitation to go out and hunt together collaboratively on the reef. If they see a fish that they're interested in trying to catch, they pursue it and if the fish swims into the matrix of the reef, well, the eel kind of like a ferret can go in there after it. If the eel catches that, people often ask me, do they share the fish if they catch it? No, they don't. Whoever catches it, each eats the whole fish. But between them because the fish has no escape route. If it swims out into the open water, the grouper is waiting, so they both do much better, estimated to be up to five times as well when they collaborate than if they go fishing alone. The purposefulness of that behavior, the flexibility that it entails, the fact that it's referential communication and the sort of the definition here for that is that it's referring to an event. So the head shake happens somewhere else, and it's referring to a future event catching a fish on the reef over there. Some minutes later, maybe even an hour later, groupers will point. They'll swim vertically and point their bodies towards a fish in the reef. They don't do that if there's no Moray around, they do that. If the Moray is nearby and they can signal to them, basically, come on over here, there's something worthwhile pursuing, and they'll do that for sometimes a while before the Moray gets the message. So it requires patience. But definitely it's just one example, I think it is gripping one of the windows into the intelligence and the minds of these fishes.
Elizabeth: [00:19:34] Going back to seaspiracy and learning about overfishing and industrialized fishing. When they're coming out and these huge nets, they're actually really suffering.
Jonathan: [00:19:43] Terribly, terribly. They're bound to be terribly suffering. I don't know if anyone's done it, but if you took a blood sample from a fish who happens to have just survived, most of them don't. Being caught in a big net and holding onto a boat deck or a tuna who's being caught and hauled onto a boat deck, you'd find astronomically high levels of stress. These are emotional animals. They have biochemistry that shows that they feel these things. They have fear, they have stress they can be depressed, according to at least one published study, which is to say, long term emotional profiles, not just how they're feeling at that one moment, they can be chronically stressed, and that can become kind of like depression, where they stop eating and they stop thriving and they they just give up.
Elizabeth: [00:20:28] What was the study for that?
Jonathan: [00:20:30 There was a study done, I think it was a Norwegian scientist who did the study and it was an aquaculture salmon operation. So this is fish farming. I think in this case, it probably was sea pens, I don't remember, but sea pens are sort of netted areas in ocean coastlines. So the animals are in ocean water, but they're trapped. They're kept in a net, usually at high densities. They were talking about documenting what are called dropouts, which are individuals who just can't cope with the stresses and strains of the crowding, the competition for food, the parasites, like fish lice, can eat into their bodies, and they can't do much about it. The chemicals used to try and treat these conditions, the antibiotics, the various incursions into their lives that they wouldn't normally face in the wild. Not to say the wild is a walk in the park or a swim in the park for a fish. But at least they're free and can do what they're motivated to, which is to migrate from long distances. Anyway, they found that these dropouts, which apparently are very common, are very widespread in salmon aquaculture. They give up and they stop eating. There's a slide I show in my talk from the study that shows a drop out below, a normal fish at the same age as a young salmon and the dropout is about a third, the size about a third, the weight. They just stop eating and they eventually float to the surface and die. They measured the stress, their cortisol levels, and they were very high in these fish. They concluded that it looks like depression. It looks like a long term negative affective state that we would call depression in our own species.
Elizabeth: [00:22:08] Would it be that surprising anyway, that they would have depression just because they seem to have pain and pleasure?
Jonathan: [00:22:15] No, no, right. Well, great question, because in light of what we now know, they have all these other attributes. No, it shouldn't be surprising, but you tell the average person that salmon can get depressed and they'll think it's a joke. But the science actually supports that. Most people don't think that fishes are capable of that.
Elizabeth: [00:22:34] But not that long ago, people were saying the same thing about dogs or apes or chimps.
Jonathan: [00:22:39] That's right. That's right. We have a history of underestimating animals' abilities. I mean, heck, I've just written a book on insect flies specifically, and this book is certainly not all about fly minds and how they think and their inner lives. But I do get into that in one chapter, but suffice to say that there's so much more that they're capable of doing than we typically believe or know.
Elizabeth: [00:23:03] Well, we don't really know much. Most people, I don't.
Jonathan: [00:23:05] We are left with the challenge. The reality is that we can't experience what they experience any more than they can, what we can. I'm not here to say that their experience of life is the same as ours. Not at all. Not for any other animal, in fact. We should celebrate the difference, the fact that they have their own ways of experiencing their lives. And yes, I'm the first to say that the phenomenon of experience which requires consciousness is not necessarily possessed of all animals, but we should be very open to the possibility we should be very accepting of it in certainly all vertebrates and now there is a growing interest in invertebrates, octopuses and squids, octopuses especially. My octopus teacher, another film that kind of really hit the zeitgeist of our time books like Other Minds, The Soul of an Octopus. There's a great deal of interest now, and it's pretty clear that consciousness evolved at least twice on this planet because octopuses are pretty clearly conscious and emotional. Yet it's been such a long time since our common ancestors diverged, that our ancestors at that time didn't have consciousness either. So it appears to have evolved at least twice, which is pretty neat. It says a lot about how darn useful it is to be conscious. Not to mention how great it is to be able to reflect and have. It allows us to have what we think of as a meaningful life. But maybe we'll find life on another planet and conscious life, and we'll have to say, well, at least three times consciousness has evolved in the cosmos. Chances are statistically, with the number of galaxies, solar systems and the planets. We're beginning to realize they're out there in this universe. We're just a tiny, tiny speck within a speck. It's pretty sobering. What are the chances that this is the only planet with life, never mind conscious life? It just seems very, very statistically unlikely, given the numbers.
Elizabeth: [00:24:59] Yeah, absolutely.
Jonathan: [00:25:25] We ought to be a little more humble about ourselves than we tend to be. We think we're the greatest gift that ever happened in the universe. Well, probably not.
Elizabeth: [00:25:06] It should also make us look a little more deeply at how we treat all the other beings on the planet. In the sense of, yeah, maybe there's all this other life out there. People often talk about things like, 'Oh, if we find another life.’ But we have all this other life here that we're ignoring.
Jonathan: [00:25:25] Yeah, there is this sort of trope, you know, gazing up at the night sky saying, are we alone? It's like, Well, wait a minute, look around. There's tons of fascinating lifeforms. We're so lucky to have all this amazing panoply of life on the planet. It's not to say, I get the question, ok are there other other humanoids out there? Or are there other conscious beings? But we ought to be pretty grateful for what we have on this planet. You know, there's a lot of amazing creatures and phenomena that we get to enjoy living with, if we can.
Elizabeth: [00:25:54] With things like my octopus teacher and Sy Montgomery's book, they've gotten better PR from all this right? Kind of in the way that whales got really good PR in the seventies, and it really changed the world for most whales or a whole lot of whales. What you've done with fish and your book and now with seaspiracy. Fish are starting to finally get some good press. But because you've written a lot of books about a lot of animals, you've studied animals for decades. What do you think it really takes to get the bigger population to really start to change? In the way that, just even in the way that, yes, a lot of people are not paying any attention to factory farming, but there are a lot more now in 2021 than they were ten years ago. You can see that the areas are getting at least some traction. I feel like with fish, what do you think It really takes to get people to say, ‘Hey, wait, I don't want to eat them anymore or I don't want to participate in that anymore?’
Jonathan: [00:26:54] Yeah, it's a great question. There's no easy answer. I think as a writer, I've learned that I need to try and not just inform and not just deliver facts, but engage emotions. The reality is that facts have been shown to not really engage emotions. It's stories that do. It's the personal aspect. It's when you think of an individual and their experience. I can say that a fish can enjoy feeling pleasure, but if I describe to you somebody's pet fish, they come home and they cup their hands in the water and the fish swims into their hand and lies on his side and his name, Jasper, and the woman strokes him with their thumb and how she felt when Jasper died years later. Or say something like that. When you start to tell a story with a personal touch that's more likely to engage in emotions. So I've learned as a science writer, it ain't just about facts and science. I think that's important, and I like including that, but I've learned to tell a lot of stories as well.
Elizabeth: [00:27:54] Speaking of fish in the tank at home, you are in another film that's coming out soon.
Jonathan: [00:27:59] Yeah, it's called the dark hobby, and it's a film that focuses on the hidden problem of the aquarium fish industry. A lot of people who have fishes in aquariums are well-meaning and all that. But the reality is that most fish who end up in an aquarium were wild caught. The methods used to catch them and the conditions with which they're handled and transported long distances, the harsh reality that in a lot of the places they end up in people's homes. The people unwittingly or otherwise are not well equipped with how to provide them with what they need. It may be impossible for a fish that lives typically 50 meters down on a reef and now finds itself living in just a couple of feet deep of water in the tank. That fish is not going to flourish. So I find if I see aquariums in a mall or a dentist office, the next time I go back usually there's quite a few different fish there. They've changed from the last time, and that's because they simply don't flourish and they don't tend to live long. It's been estimated that the mortality rate is about 90 percent from capture to destination, and within a year about another 90 percent who've made it to the destination. They're gone. So it's been likened a bit to the cut flower industry where cut flowers are not intended to live very long. They're pretty to look at, but they die. Of course, we're now talking about with fish, we're talking about sentient beings, individuals who also die. So it is sad and it's an issue that needs to be understood by the broader public. I hope that the film will get some views.
Elizabeth: [00:29:36] Yeah, because I don't think a lot of people think about it with aquariums.
Jonathan: [00:29:39] Yeah, I think most people don't think about it. It's an extension of what we've been talking about, how we tend to demean or reduce fishes to something to be less concerned about. But we need to realize that we ought to be concerned about them too, for the same reasons, we're concerned about other animals.
Elizabeth: [00:29:57] Well, and now you're going to make us all be concerned about flies.
Jonathan: [00:30:01] Well, I'm glad you said that because, it's different, it's such a vast difference. It’s a group of animals and how we make connections with them. I do try to get people scratching their heads and thinking, maybe there's a lot more going on here than we thought. But first of all, we don't tend to eat flies in the way we eat fish. We don't catch them in big nets and that sort of thing. It's a very different moral landscape. But the take home message is that we need them. We have to have them. They are very troublesome to us. In some cases, but the vast majority are not. If the planet suddenly was devoid of flies, we probably wouldn't be having many more of these podcasts because they run the planet. They help run the planet. Insects are 80 percent of all the animals on the planet. Flies are extremely successful and numerous and diverse, and the planet hums with functioning life because of them. If they disappeared, food webs would collapse and we wouldn't be able to feed ourselves and we would perish, too.
Elizabeth: [00:31:04] Wow.
Jonathan: [00:31:05] It's quite as simple as that
Elizabeth: [00:31:06] And that is definitely something that I don't think about, and I'm sure most people are not thinking about either.
Jonathan: [00:31:09] Yeah, probably not. So hopefully a few of them will read Superfly and come out with more awareness of that.
Elizabeth: [00:31:15] What's the craziest thing you learned or the thing that shocked you the most while you're working on it?
Jonathan: [00:31:22] I guess one thing that just springs immediately to mind, this is a terrible thing to say because it's not very ingratiating. It doesn't ingratiate us towards flies. But mosquitoes are credited with killing more humans than humans have killed. They're the only animal that apparently ranks above us throughout history. It's been estimated that there's been an accumulation of about 112 billion humans who've walked the Earth throughout the history of the human race. Somewhere over 52 billion of them were killed by mosquitoes, which is to say the diseases that mosquitoes carry. So, yeah, pretty amazing. I need to do some more homework on what I'm going to say in media interviews about flies, because that's not very ingratiating. Mosquitos are just a particular type. I mentioned orgasms in male fruit flies a little earlier. I guess I would say there's an illustration of the incredible fecundity of flies the capacity to to reproduce, another one that may be not ingratiating, there might be a better example. Two fruit flies breeding on January 1st in a hypothetical year. If you take just the 25th generation at the end of the year, if there were no mortality, if that 25th generation was, you know, there it is and you're not even counting the previous 24 generations, you'd have a ball of flies that would reach from here to the sun and a little bit further. So thank goodness for ecological controls and things like species eating other animals. How ironic. You know, we're talking about not eating animals, and that's a good thing to aim for humans. But yeah, it's important that there are little animals eating little animals out there to keep things in check.
Elizabeth: [00:33:04] That is incredible. That is just astonishing.
Jonathan: [00:33:07] I learned that in my undergraduate biology degree, the introduction to the entomology textbook that we had. The insect textbook presented that scenario, and it was quite eye-opening.
Elizabeth: [00:33:18] You're working on a book right now.
Jonathan: [00:33:20] Well, yes, I am. It's a children's book. It's my first children's fiction book, just a little story about a boy and a fish. It's called Jake and Ava, a boy and a fish. It's two parallel stories about a boy who catches a fish on his first fishing outing and the parallel story of the fish who he ends up catching. Then the story coalesces at the end of the two stories. The boy experiences kind of what I experienced when I was taken fishing as a youngster. He relates to the fish. He feels empathy for the fish. He sees the fish suffocating and he's got a hook in its mouth and it doesn't seem like a very nice situation to be in.
Elizabeth: [00:34:00] That's what happened to you?
Jonathan: [00:34:02] Oh, yeah, yeah. In fact, at the beginning of my book What a Fish Knows, I relate an experience from when I was eight years old, being taken out fishing by a camp director and I caught fish, I caught a bunch of fish. Most of them were thrown back, but a number of the bigger ones were kept. I saw earthworms wriggling on hooks. I didn't have to do any of the dirty work. I saw the bigger ones having a knife plunged into their head to try and kill them. It was just violent and disturbing, and it still took me many years to process that and to develop the emotional and ethical maturity that I can make the decision to remove myself. Or try to remove myself from those kinds of things by not purchasing the product, by not eating fish. But you know, that was years later, moral evolution takes a while for the individual. So through my work, I try to hasten that a little bit.
Elizabeth: [00:34:58] I do think now, so it seems now, because there's so many other external factors getting kind of piped in through social media documentaries and everything else. That is happening a lot faster for people who are kind of already drawn to it. So a kid who would probably have gone through your experience and then they're seeing documentaries and they're seeing videos on YouTube.
Jonathan: [00:35:23] Yeah. For all the challenges we're facing, the pandemic, you know, human population growth, migrations, human refugees, I mean, there's so many issues. Nevertheless, I'm somewhat heartened and encouraged by the unprecedented moral concern and moral awareness we're beginning to show towards other animals. It's frustrating that we're still collectively going the wrong way because animal consumption is growing in some parts of the world, while it's now beginning to be replaced with other technologies and other food sources in other parts of the world. It's very exciting to see that this stuff could be a game changer. It needs to be a game changer with the climate change that I meant to mention is another challenge we're faced with. It's all coalescing. We're beginning to realize this is all connected. The pandemic and climate change are not independent of our food choices. The food choices are very much linked to that. Even if we're selfish, we need to change our eating habits because we're going down with the planet if the planet's going to go down and by the way we're much more vulnerable than flies, say, and a lot of fish. They'll be around, they'll survive. And maybe we will as a species, but we need to change the direction. We need to change our habits, because if we don't, if we continue to just run roughshod over the planet, then it's us who are going to repay ultimately.
Elizabeth: [00:36:44] And last question I have for you. So since we've been in the pandemic for a year and we know that the pandemic was caused by how we treat animals. If we didn't have this relationship with animals, we wouldn't have these zoological diseases. Not most of them. Do you think outside of a certain bubble that that information has spread to awareness and consciousness?
Jonathan: [00:37:09] I wish I could answer yes to that, but my answer from my perspective is absolutely not. I don't think it has. Maybe it will. Maybe that connection will ultimately be made. But with all the news on the pandemic on, everybody can spell COVID-19 now and coronavirus. It's all over the news all the time. I don't see much discussion about where it came from and why and the animal element. We don't seem to have learned or are learning that lesson from this case, and a lot of people have been talking about how we're going to face this kind of stuff more and more if we keep going on our current route. It's so frustrating when you see news reports about a food poisoning outbreak, E. coli outbreak in some shipment of spinach or tomatoes somewhere. E. coli is named for the colon where the bacteria come from. It wasn't the tomatoes or the spinach, they don't have colons. It was the animal manure or some other animal product that was sprayed or put on those plants that led to the E. coli outbreak. So it's annoying when veggies get the blame. Animal agriculture is really ultimately responsible.
Elizabeth: [00:38:14] That's true. Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for this, and it was great to see you on Seaspiracy. I'm excited to see, what's the aquarium movie called?
Jonathan: [00:38:25] The dark hobby.
Elizabeth: [00:38:26] The dark hobby. Very cool.
Jonathan: [00:38:28] Thanks, Beth. A real pleasure to speak with you.
Elizabeth: [00:38:40] To learn more about Jonathan and his work, go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything we are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky and Anna Conner, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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