Unlike the Immortal Sablefish?

“It is a slow-growing species, extremely vulnerable to mortality,” says Leonard.

*blink?*

As opposed to all those immortal fishes??

Sure, he’s saying that a species with lots of fast-growing, fast-to-reproduce individuals have less of a problem with mortality, as a species. That’s why no-one is complaining about the overfishing of krill. It just struck me as funny. What with pretty much every known species being vulnerable to mortality, as far as I know.

How this happened: I was in Whole Foods yesterday looking for halibut (because it’s high in magnesium and therefore good for my joints), but halibut’s apparently out of season, and I got suckered into buying some Chilean sea bass because it had a “sustainable fisheries” sticker on it and looked the most like halibut of anything there. Then I felt guilty because of the whole fishing thing in general and the Chilean sea bass thing in particular, so I looked it up and found the above quote which, perversely, made me feel better about the whole thing. I feel guilty about buying fish, generally. Except for the ultra-sustainable tilapia (which I think of as the bamboo of fish). But who wants to eat tilapia all the time? Bland. Not so much with the Omega-3s. A bit on the pointless side. May as well eat tofu. (In fact, I’d usually rather eat tofu than tilapia.)

Plus, today I discovered that despite halibut being at the very top of the “high in magnesium” foods list, there are no other fish on there at all. So the whole magnesium justification is out, and I should just eat spinach instead.