Good morning. Today is quintidi, the 25th of Ventôse, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le thon, the (very large) chicken of the sea.
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Bluefin tuna can accidentally cook themselves. These remarkable predators are like the platypus of the sea – they hunt in pods like orcas, are able to generate their own body heat like orcas, and can grow as large and swim as fast as orcas, but they ain't orcas. They're just (amazing) fish, but all that internal combustion power comes at a price. Because they can't regulate their body temperature, the internal heat needs to slowly dissipate into the cool waters of the Atlantic. If they struggle too much too quickly – like, say, if they're fighting to be free of a fishing net – they can kill themselves and cook their own meat in the process. This would be convenient except, for starters, bluefin is prized as sashimi, so we actually want it raw, and more importantly, this "cooking" process isn't a delicious sear but a meltdown of tissue the immediately starts to rot. What a way to flip the bird to one of their only natural predators.
It's about this time of year that preparations for the massacre would begin. The mattanza (which literally means "massacre") was an ancient ritual dating back to the Phoenicians, then exported to the Western Mediterranean by the conquering Moors. The ritual became deeply embedded in the culture of coastal Italian, Sicilian, and Portuguese settlements that happened to be nearby bluefin tuna migration routes.
While the catches themselves took place in late spring, this was a method of fishing developed before there were boats large and fast enough to handle the massive and swift fish, so instead it relies on trickery and traps. About now, teams of 50 men would set out in boats to create an underwater labyrinth of hemp nets stretching for six miles, all designed with one goal in mind: to lead a school of tuna into the chamber of death.
