“Red tide” has become a familiar shorthand for unusual changes in the color of ocean waters. It is intimately related both to blooms of creatures like dinoflagellates and to the devastating effects they pose to coastal fisheries. This essay tracks the early twentieth century emergence of discolored water as an aquacultural problem, known in Japan as akashio, and its trans-oceanic transformation into the terms and practices of “red tide” in the post-World War II United States. For Japan’s “Pearl King” Mikimoto (...) Kōkichi and his contacts in diverse marine scientific communities, the years-long cycle of guarding and cultivating a pearl oyster went together with the ascription of moral qualities to tiny creatures that posed a threat to farmed bayscapes of pearl monoculture. As akashio, discolored water went from curiosity to marine livestock pest, one that at times left dead pearl oysters in its wake. Red tide arose from the sustained study of the mechanisms by which changes in the biological and chemical composition of seawater might become deadly to exclusively-claimed shellfish along Japanese coastlines, but came to be seen as a way to understand aquatic manifestations of harm in other parts of the littoral world. (shrink)

By comparison with the Atlantic Ocean, the physical oceanography of the Pacific was poorly known as late as the end of the 1930s. International collaboration to study the Pacific, attempted by oceanography committees of the Pacific Science Association, was a failure, owing to the scale of the enterprise, the low scientific abilities of the Pacific nations, and the lack of a compelling need. Even in the U.S.A., where the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was active, lack of good ships and personnel (...) reduced the effectiveness of Pacific oceanography. Scripps's physical oceanographer George F. McEwen was more physicist than physical oceanographer; he also became side-tracked into climatology. Only with the arrival of H. U. Sverdrup at Scripps in 1936 did Pacific physical oceanography begin to prosper, but its greatest success followed World War II, when techniques and approaches transplanted from the Atlantic became established. (shrink)

This article looks at how fisheries biologists of the early twentieth century conceptualized and measured overfishing and attempted to make it a scientific object. Considering both theorizing and physical practices, the essay shows that categories and understandings of both the fishing industry and fisheries science were deeply and, at times, inextricably interwoven. Fish were both scientific and economic objects. The various models fisheries science used to understand the world reflected amalgamations of biological, physical, economic, and political factors. As a result, (...) scientists had great difficulty stabilizing the concept of overfishing and many influential scholars into the 1930s even doubted the coherence of the concept. In light of recent literature in history of fisheries and environmental social sciences that critiques the infiltration of political and economic imperatives into fisheries and environmental sciences more generally, this essay highlights both how early fisheries scientists understood their field of study as the entire combination of interactions between political, economic, biological and physical factors and the work that was necessary to separate them. (shrink)