Reading the Sea
The following is part of Currents and Tidings, a series that explores the implications of climate change for fishing and fisher livelihoods through the stories and voices of fishers.
Traditionally, coastal fishers could “read” the weather by watching the sea and feeling the winds. They knew which direction the wind should blow and when the seasonal storms should arrive, and what those particular conditions meant for the behavior of the fish. This knowledge was gathered from year-round observation of the environment, and it was fine-tuned and passed down through generations. But when climate change interferes with the seasons and we can look up the weather on the internet, does this traditional fishers’ knowledge become obsolete?
Climate change impacts seasonality in a variety of ways. Traditional fishing is tightly coupled with the seasons, and these changes can destabilize the ability of the fishers to make predictions about their environment. As the global climate warms and the water warms with it, the timing of seasonal natural phenomena in the seas changes. Plankton blooms and fish reproduction may shift earlier or later, with consequences rippling up the food chain. Changes in the circulation of the atmosphere influence the direction, strength, and timing of seasonal winds and storms. Warming waters and changing ocean currents mean that migrating fish may arrive along the shores of fishing communities in a different season than they once did.
I sat down with Gaetano Urzì, the president of the fishers’ cooperative in the Gulf of Catania. Catania is situated on the east coast of Sicily on the Ionian Sea in the shadow of volcanic Mount Etna. Fishing has always played an important economic and cultural role in the city, which is home to one of Sicily’s largest and most vibrant open-air fish markets called A Piscarìa in Sicilian.
Photo by Emily Farr
Gaetano, who refers to himself as a “50% fisherman,” speaks in a quiet, low voice. The sea is in his blood—his father, grandfather, and uncle were all fishermen—and his face breaks out into a warm smile as he recalls the fishing escapades of his youth. His father took out his boat before the sunrise every day until he was eighty-five, using a different kind of net to catch particular fish in every season.
Gaetano worries that young fishermen rely too much on technology today and that they forget what it means to respect and to cooperate with the sea. We chatted about the history of fishing in Catania and the relationship between changing seasonality and traditional fishing.
Emily: Can you tell me about the history of fishing in the Gulf of Catania?
Gaetano: Here in Catania, the tradition has always been primarily small-scale fishing, passed down from father to son. When I was a boy, so we are talking about the end of the ‘60s, every boat did at least four or five different kinds of fishing according to the season. By the 1980s this seasonal diversification had slowly dwindled to the point where, today, if a boat is not fishing just a single species or using a single kind of net, it is doing at most two kinds of fishing during the year.
Also in the beginning of the 1980s, large trawling boats arrived in the gulf and began to create huge problems. The trawlers drag huge nets along the sea floor, destroying the habitat where the juvenile fish live. By the middle of the decade, the impoverishment of the sea began to become apparent—in large part because of the trawlers, but also due to the effects of coastal pollution and, particularly in the last twenty years, of climate change.
Emily: What kinds of climatic changes have you noticed?
Gaetano: The temperature of the water has gotten warmer, and this has contributed significantly to the depletion of fish in the sea. Something else that has drawn my attention is the near-disappearance of seasonal storm surges in recent years. Until the 1990s, there were always a certain number of large storm surges during the year, which served to exchange the water along the coast with the water further out to sea, bringing in oxygen.
Photo by Emily Farr
Emily: How does the infrequency and weakening of the storm surges influence fishing in the gulf?
Gaetano: When the storm surges arrive, as soon as the weather starts to clear and the wind passes, the fisherman sets out his fixed nets and catches significant quantities of fish like sole and striped sea bream. These fish live on the seafloor along the coast and are normally very difficult to catch, but the storm surges stir them from their hiding places and bring them into the fishers’ nets. This change in storm surges, in my opinion, is tied to the shifting seasons, and has a significant impact on the regeneration of the sea, and therefore on our ability to fish.
Emily: Can you tell me more about the shifting seasons?
Gaetano: The seasonality is no longer understandable. You can’t say that the fishing season has shifted in any particular direction, but rather that sometimes you fish during a period in which, traditionally when the seasons still worked, would not have happened. There is a sort of anarchy.
Emily: The fish are confused.
Gaetano: Exactly, it is biological anarchy. When I was young, there were periods of the year when the larger fish that live in the open sea like the Atlantic bonito or the little tunny would come close to the coast. I remember when I was about seven or eight years old, the little tunnies entered into the gulf of Catania. One afternoon, there were so many that all the children went down to the sea and we tried to catch them in our nets. This kind of thing happened annually, and now we don’t find those fish near the coast anymore. Why is that? Many of the intensive fishing practices that targeted these large fish have been abolished by the European Union, so something besides just overfishing is to blame.
“We are losing this rich oral history of fishing.”
Emily: I am curious about how the anarchy in the sea has changed the livelihoods of the fishermen, particularly in a place like Catania where the traditional knowledge about how to fish according to the seasons has been passed down through generations.
Gaetano: The seasonal phenomena that once existed, and that were a part of the traditional knowledge of the fishermen, are impossible to rely on. Today, we can look at weather.com on our phones anytime, but the fisherman used to be able to read the weather just by looking at the sea. He would look at Etna, or at the marine horizon to the east and see the ribbon of clouds that come with the scirocco, the wind from the southeast. Or he would look to the horizon where the sea was a bit choppy and he could see all the way to the Calabrian coast, and know that it is the period of the tramontana, the northern wind. The fishermen oriented themselves in this way. If Etna was in a particular position on the coast, it meant you were in a zone of a certain depth. They had a mental atlas of the sea floor, meter by meter, and they never made a mistake. The echo sounders we have today can map the seafloor within a meter or two, but my father’s mental map was never even off by a centimeter. We are losing this rich oral history of fishing. And I think that, as a result, we are losing the true meaning of being a fisherman.
Small-scale coastal fishers like Gaetano and his father are particularly attuned, and vulnerable, to patterns of environmental change. These fishers possess a rich base of historical knowledge about fish migrations and behavior, wind and weather events, and changes in seasonal fishing. They spend their lives on the water, and they know how the sea is changing day by day in ways that cannot be substituted by technology.
As climate change continues to shift the seasons and alter the marine environment, coastal fishing communities will need to find ways to adapt. This may mean fishing a new species, using a new type of net, or building collaborations between fishers, scientists, and regulatory bodies. Adaptation will look different in each community, and the nuanced knowledge of the fishers has a key role to play in shaping the content of those adaptations. If the fishers’ knowledge is lost, or becomes obsolete due to climate change, it is the fishing communities that will suffer most.
This interview has been translated from Italian, condensed and edited.
Emily graduated from Yale University with a B.S. in geology. Don't ask her about rocks though, she is interested in the intersection of fisheries, fisherfolk, and climate change.