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And, we’re back! After a bit of a hiatus, the Hunt Gather Talk podcast is back for a Season Three. This season will focus entirely on fish and seafood, freshwater and salt. Think of this as the podcast behind my latest cookbook, Hook, Line, and Supper, which covers all things aquatic.

I am happy to be working with two title sponsors, E-Fish and Filson. These will be the only two commercial sponsors of the show, a move I’ve made to keep things as uncluttered as possible. I happen to already wear a lot of both Filson and I love what the folks at E-Fish are doing, so it’s a natural fit.

Every episode of Season Three will dig deep into some aspect of the fish and seafood world, from prep and how to sessions to sustainability and the farmed vs. wild debate, to how fish and seafood plays into other world cuisines, to episodes on specific kinds of fish. This is where we’ll begin.

In this episode I talk with UC Santa Barbara Professor Milton Love all about Pacific rockfish.

Even if you live nowhere near the Pacific, you will want to listen to this episode — it’s one of my all-time favorite conversations, as Milton is as funny as he is knowledgeable. Think Gene Wilder as a fish geek. It’s so worth your time… 

For more information on this episode, here are some helpful links:

• Milton’s hilarious and informative books on Pacific fish include: Rockfishes of the Eastern Pacific, as well as broader books on Pacific fish called Probably More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast, and Certainly More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast. 
• An article I wrote on How to Catch Pacific Rockfish
• A selection of recipes that work with rockfish.

A Request

I have brought back Hunt Gather Talk with the hopes that your generosity can help keep it going season after season. My two sponsors help things a lot, but you are the third leg of the stool. Think of this like public radio, only with hunting and fishing and wild food and stuff. No, Hunt Gather Talk won’t be a “pay-to-play” podcast, so you don’t necessarily have to chip in. But I am asking you to consider it. Every little bit helps to pay for editing, servers, and, frankly to keep the lights on here. Thanks in advance for whatever you can contribute!

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Transcript

As a service to those with hearing issues, or for anyone who would rather read our conversation than hear it, here is the transcript of the show. Enjoy!

Hank Shaw:

Welcome, everybody, back to the Hunter Gather Talk podcast. It is good to be back. It’s definitely good to be talking with you again and talking about a subject that is near and dear to my heart, which is fish and seafood. Yep. The entire season of season three for Hunter Gather Talk is going to be about fish and seafood in all its various forms, so we’re going to cover things in the ocean, things in fresh water, and some issues of things like sustainability, and how-to stuff, and about some species-specific stuff. And in fact, that is where we’re going to kick things off. I wanted to kick off this season with one of my favorite podcast episodes of all time, and that would be my interview with Milton Love.

Hank Shaw:

Milton Love, if you have not heard of him, is the foremost authority on Pacific rockfish. So Pacific rockfish are this amazing series of species that exist from, well, all over the Pacific on the Japanese side and on our side in the West. There’s also a couple species in the North Atlantic, as a matter of fact. They are called the Acadian redfish. So if you’ve ever seen redfish up in New England, that will be rockfish as well.

Hank Shaw:

So it’s an amazing group of fish. They’re super diverse. There’s a lot to talk about. And what’s even cooler is, Milton Love is arguably the greatest combination of real-deal scientist and a very genuinely funny guy. So this is not going to be any kind of dry podcast that you might think, and I think you guys are going to enjoy it quite a bit. And let’s take it away.

Hank Shaw:

Well, Milton Love, welcome to the podcast. I am super happy to have you on, because anyone who knows me knows that I’m kind of obsessed with rockfish, and it’s nice to talk to somebody who’s even more obsessed with rockfish.

Milton Love:

If possible. Yes. Well, thank you for inviting me. As you know, I have no life. I just sit here at my desk with my hands folded, waiting for people to suggest podcasts. So it’s all good.

Hank Shaw:

I detect a bit of sarcasm in that.

Milton Love:

Oh, God forbid. Oh no, no.

Hank Shaw:

So right off the get-go, I can now hear your voice in that book that you co-wrote, The Rockfishes of the Eastern Pacific, which I have to say, having read, I don’t know, reams and reams and reams of scientific and biological things over the last 40 years, it’s one of the more entertaining and informative and approachable books on biology I think I’ve ever read.

Milton Love:

Oh, well that was the intent. I must say that my co-authors were fairly lenient about my putting in kind of an informal style and some humor. There was only one or two occasions where they basically went, “You can’t do that.” And so, that was really good. And just to publicize another book, the following book, Certainly More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast, which I wrote entirely on my own, I just let myself just completely go to hell, and had no internal or external editors. So that one really sounds like me. There was a couple times when I would read something to my wife, and she would go like, “You just can’t do that,” and I would thank her and then just do it.

Hank Shaw:

I actually know this book as well, only because I was on a three-day trip out of San Diego and the captain had this book in the salon. I mean, you’re spending hours and hours and hours on a boat going to where you’re going to go fish, and this book was sitting there and just had everybody laughing their asses off about these fish that we get to know and love on the Pacific Coast.

Milton Love:

I mean, there’s an awful lot of variety among, not just among rockfishes, but among all the fishes. And there’s always something to say about any species. And I feel, if you can make it humorous, than people are more likely to read it than if it’s just dry and turgid, which is like all of the scientific writing I do, which has to be in a horribly pedantic, completely non-humorous way. It’s awful. It’s awful to write.

Hank Shaw:

It is kind of a shame that that’s been not only the standard, but it’s taboo to write as a normal human in scientific literature.

Milton Love:

It is. And there actually is a reason, and it’s an okay reason. And the basic thing is that in science, you are just conveying facts, and that’s all your job is. In a discussion, you can kind of extrapolate and so forth, but you can’t say anything that’s misleading. And the beauty of humor, if you think about it, it’s a person telling their own truth, but in a way that, at the beginning of the humorous bit, it misleads you. And then he tells or she tells you the truth, and laughter is that surprise at the end. Well, in science, no surprises. You’re just supposed to write a what you found, and not surprise anybody. So, no humor.

Hank Shaw:

I totally get it. I used to have to write AP copy. I was a journalist for 18 years.

Milton Love:

Okay. So, same thing. Exactly.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, totally. And then, as opposed to, as you say, a column.

Milton Love:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Precisely. And in fact, my major professor, Al [Ibling 00:05:52], oh, I don’t know, back in whatever, 1970, told me that you should write as if you’re writing for a newspaper. And so, you’re correct.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. So how did you get involved with rockfishes? I imagine it’s kind of a lifelong deal, no?

Milton Love:

It is. So at the age of six, my family moved to Santa Monica, just west of LA, on the beach. Literally, our house, I could throw a stone onto the beach, and I started fishing. My father took me fishing when I was six on the Malibu pier, and I think I caught one white croaker and two shiner perch, and soon after, announcer I was going to be an ichthyologist, a fish biologist, which I never diverted from that, which shows a profound lack of imagination on my part.

Milton Love:

And then at the age of, I think about nine, so it must’ve been about 1956, my father took me fishing on a sport fishing boat from Malibu. I think it was the [Lenbrook 00:11:13]. And I’m guessing it was [Frenchie Margiline 00:07:04] who was the skipper. It was probably November, so they tried fishing for calico bass, but it was too cold. Calicos didn’t… Nothing bit.

Milton Love:

So they went out to 300 feet of water and started fishing for rockfish. That was my first experience with them. And we probably caught, oh, nine or 10 species. I didn’t know the names, but I could tell that they were kind of related to each other. And there was fat, squat, red ones, and there was sleeker, brownish ones. There was just everything you can imagine. And that was my first experience, and I was kind of blown away by the diversity. And that was the start. So, when I was nine.

Milton Love:

And then in college, I just by sheer stubbornness, decided to do a master’s degree and a PhD involving rockfish. And fortunately, my major professor was very longsuffering, and he went just, “What the hell. Go ahead.” So, that’s how it started, and I never really lost an interest in this remarkable group of fishes.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. I mean, I kind of had the same experience many, many years later. Because I grew up in New Jersey, and so I grew up on the same kind of deal, going on party boats and head boats down the shore and on Long Island. I was a deck hand.

Milton Love:

Oh, good.

Hank Shaw:

And so, I’ve fished commercially in Alaska, so I’ve got a lot of sea hours under my belt. But as a kid, though, I always loved the idea of bottom fishing, because you never knew what you were going to get.

Milton Love:

That’s right. And probably in those days, there were still a lot of… I don’t know, were there still a lot of cod to fish for, things like that?

Hank Shaw:

It was a different… It was sort of seasonal.

Milton Love:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

So the main deal for us during the summer months and the nice weather was porgies, black sea bass, [bregals 00:09:03], blackfish, tautog. Occasionally a tilefish would come in a little shallower-

Milton Love:

Oh, yeah.

Hank Shaw:

… but it was your same six or seven different kinds of fish.

Hank Shaw:

So, I moved to California in 2004, ironically to cover Governor Schwarzenegger.

Milton Love:

Yes, indeed.

Hank Shaw:

I mean, if you cover politics for a living, you’ve got to do something to keep yourself sane.

Milton Love:

Sure.

Hank Shaw:

So, I would fish all the time, and I discovered the party boat fleet in San Francisco Bay and Emeryville, and well, “What are these rockfish?” And they’re like, “Oh yeah, it’s kind of like a bass kind of deal.” Like, “All right, cool. I like that.”

Milton Love:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

So I went out, and we didn’t fish the Farallons that first time, but it was just, everybody was catching these different fish, and they all kind of sort of looked like black sea bass.

Milton Love:

Right.

Hank Shaw:

But they were all different colors and different gill plates, and some were super spiny and some were not, and I had the same experience. I was like, “Wow, this is just super trippy. What are all these things?” And they’re like, “Oh, they’re rock cod or rock fish.”

Milton Love:

Indeed. And I should have also said from my childhood, the other reason I was interested in rockfish is when I caught them from party boats, I would… This is from Santa Monica. They have a pier there. So the boat would come in, and I would immediately sell them illegally to people who were waiting for passengers to sell them illegally, and I would make enough money to pay for the next trip. Usually not much more.

Milton Love:

And it was a different time. I never saw a warden. I knew it was illegal, but there was no enforcement, at least at the time, say 1960 or so, at all. So there was a number of us who, all of the same age, 15, 16, 18, who would really just catch fish just to pay for the next trips. It was kind of a benign addiction, I suppose.

Hank Shaw:

It’s funny. I did the exact same thing on the Jersey Shore-

Milton Love:

Cool.

Hank Shaw:

… to the local Italian restaurants with like-

Milton Love:

That’s even more intense, oh my God.

Hank Shaw:

They wanted the porgies and they wanted wheatfish.

Milton Love:

Oh gosh, that’s a quantum leap from… I never thought about pedaling them to anybody except elderly immigrant women who flocked there, and they knew exactly what times the boats would come in. And it was jolly, man. I love that stuff.

Hank Shaw:

I would say it definitely was. I mean, if you’ve ever seen the TV show The Sopranos, that’s exactly where I grew up.

Milton Love:

Yeah. Oh, that’s great. Oh my God.

Hank Shaw:

So, the coolest thing about them is the diversity, I think from a regular sort of Joe six-pack kind of angle on it.

Milton Love:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

But I think the first thing that struck me as I started to dig into this set of fishes is they’re all Sebastes.

Milton Love:

I’m sorry-

Hank Shaw:

What are there, 75 of them?

Milton Love:

Oh, so they’re all in the same genus.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah.

Milton Love:

And there’s about 105 worldwide.

Hank Shaw:

Oh wow.

Milton Love:

Most of them, as you say, about 70, live on the Pacific Coast, from Baja California to Alaska. But about 30 live around Korea and Japan, there’s about four in the North Atlantic, say Iceland and Canada, and the like, and then there’s two that live off South America and South Africa. And they’re very closely related genetically. This would be the equivalent.

Milton Love:

So, we’re in the genus Homo, Homo sapiens. There are no other members of that genus that are still alive, but it would be similar-

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, because it’s like we whacked them all, right?

Milton Love:

Probably. For whatever reason, they’re no longer here. And knowing our psychology, yeah. We whacked them. And probably about 35,000 years ago, the last of our relatives died, though we still carry Neanderthal genes. Maybe-

Hank Shaw:

And Denisovan, too.

Milton Love:

And Denisovan, and probably there’s another one they just discovered back in the China area. Anyway, so it would be equivalent to there being 100 different closely-related humans living on earth. That’s what the rockfishes have carried out.

Milton Love:

So, they speciate like bats out of hell, and you can actually find, off California, two species of rockfish that are so closely related that they’re just barely different genetically. The black and yellow rockfish, and the gopher rockfish. So if you look at them, the pattern on their bodies… First of all, their body shape is identical. The only real difference is black and yellows live from about, say 10 feet of water to about 50 feet of water, and gophers live from about 30 feet of water to 120 feet of water. And the only real difference is black and yellows are indeed black and yellow, and gophers are brown and pink. But genetically, you’ve got to look really hard to find differences, and you’ll occasionally find a hybrid individual. So those species are in the process of becoming really distinct, and if we look 50,000 years from now, they would be completely distinct. So there’s speciation going on right now.

Hank Shaw:

That’s crazy. So, I’ve caught buckets of gophers and I don’t know that I’ve ever caught a black and yellow.

Milton Love:

Are you up in the San Francisco area?

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. Yeah. So, I typically fish either Bodega… I fished rockfish from San Diego to Alaska, but typically I’m in the North Pacific here in the Northern California area.

Milton Love:

Yeah. So, black and yellow’s, they’ve been found as far north as Northern California, but they really poop out right around Monterey.

Hank Shaw:

Ah.

Milton Love:

Whereas gophers, they’re still abundant, oh gosh, to Cape Mendocino or something like that. Yeah. There’s all kinds of variation and ranges. I mean, there are some species that never come south of Oregon, or actually, some of them, even British Columbia. And then there’s a few that only live in the Gulf of California. So there’s a wide variety of geographic ranges.

Hank Shaw:

It’s funny. I didn’t know this until I read your book, but my mom is from Gloucester, Massachusetts, really Ipswich, just north of it, but same difference. And there’s a fish that we get out there that we call a redfish.

Milton Love:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

And I just grew up with them and they call them ocean perch or redfish or whatever. And then, not to be confused with the redfish from the Gulf of Mexico, of course.

Milton Love:

Exactly.

Hank Shaw:

But I recently saw one, I don’t know, post-2004, after my introduction to the rockfish, I’m like, “God damn, this looks like a rockfish.” Sure enough.

Milton Love:

Yes. And in fact, the original rockfish, the first species that was named Sebastes, was named by a French guy named Cuvier, who was really a remarkable dude, man. This guy was a government official through the last of the Louis, before the French Revolution. He was a government official during the time of Napoleon, and during the terror, and he was a government official after Napoleon was defeated under Louis the 16th, and he never lost his head. And he was a high government official, so the dude was really talented in that respect. He was also the major fish taxonomist, the person who named hundreds of species of fishes and other things. And the first rockfish he named was a Sebastes from Norway, I think, which is also found in your area, neck of the woods. So yeah, I mean your rosefish or redfish or ocean perch is probably the original, or one of the original, rockfishes.

Milton Love:

And it’s very closely related. And what we think happened was that all of the rockfishes, all four species, or maybe five, in the North Atlantic, are derived from a rockfish that swam from the Alaska area all the way across the Arctic to the North Atlantic about 3 million years ago. About that time, the ice shelf melted. Most of the pack ice melted in the Arctic, and that allowed a lot of species of fish to swim back and forth, but primarily from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And so, the ancestor of the rockfish that are there now probably came about about 3 million years ago.

Hank Shaw:

So that’s interesting. So you get halibut and codfish do the same thing.

Milton Love:

Halibut and codfish did the same thing. And there’s also some poachers and oobley-goobley things that no one catches that also… Snail fishes also did the same-

Hank Shaw:

Hagfish, too.

Milton Love:

Hagfish, perhaps, though hagfish are so old and have been around for so long that it’s unclear how they moved and when.

Hank Shaw:

So how do you get that crazy one down by Chile?

Milton Love:

So that came about during an ice age, and basically what prevents rockfishes, right now, from just swimming from Baja California to Peru is the water’s too warm. And it’s even too warm for the larvae, which can drift for a month or more. But during the last ice age, or maybe the one before that, the ocean currents were sufficiently cold that larvae probably once drifted south from Baja California to Peru or Colombia or Ecuador and took residence. And those species, two or maybe three, are closely related to all of the rockfishes that have those five light spots on their back. Starries-

Hank Shaw:

Starries. Yeah.

Milton Love:

Rosies, rose thorns and all those things. Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

Shout out to our sponsor, Filson. Filson is based in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle to be exact, and they are the maker of some of the toughest fishing and outdoor gear you can possibly buy. I’ve been buying it for 20 years, and some of my 20-year-old stuff is still good. You can buy Filson products at filson.com, and there are all kinds of good stuff for being out on the water, in the field, or in the duck blind, even. They have a new duck hunting section, they have always had some of the best Upland gear there is, and their fishing and foul-weather gear is second to none.

Hank Shaw:

Let’s talk about color for a second, one of the beauties, in both just physical beauty of these fish, and also just the thing that delights everyone who catches them. I always tell new anglers here in my area, or really anywhere in the Pacific Coast, they want to know about, “Oh, well, I want to go fishing, but I’m not really into salmon trolling because you can go for hours and not catch one and…” Like, “Go rockfishing.”

Milton Love:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

Every single time they come back from rockfishing, they’re astonished at the rainbow.

Milton Love:

Right on.

Hank Shaw:

What’s the explanation for all of that? I mean, is it depth, is it just sexual selection, or does anybody really know?

Milton Love:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we know as much as scientists. Scientists are trained never to know anything. All you can do is kind of approach the truth, and you hope that your approaches get better and better over time as more data comes in.

Milton Love:

So, the basic principle is, the deeper the rockfish lives, the more likely it is to be red, yellow, or orange. And the reason for that is that once you get below 30 feet, there is no red light. And once you get below, I can’t remember, 60 feet, there’s no orange light, and so forth. And by the time you get down to, I can’t remember, 120 feet or something, all you have is green and blue light. So, anything with red pigment in 60 feet of water, it looks black. And so, there’s been selection for deeper-water rockfish to look black, because that way a harbor seal or a sea lion can’t eat them, and their prey can’t see them.

Milton Love:

So, to flip it another way, if you’re a blue-colored fish in 600 feet of water, people can see you. A predator can see you. So, there’s been strong selection for those bright colors in deep water. The flip side is, you don’t want to be red, necessarily, and live in 20 feet of water because you just stand out like a sore thumb. So, the rockfishes in shallow water, they tend to be browns and they tend to be black and they tend to be slate blue and colors like that.

Milton Love:

That’s the first thing. And then the second thing is that if you look at the typical rockfish, the back and sides are colored, but the belly is shiny colored, and that’s called counter shading. And that’s really striking on blue rockfish and black rockfish and yellow tails. And the reason for that is, if you’re underneath a blue rockfish, what you see is all that sunlight coming down. It’s kind of shiny. And you see the shiny belly of a blue rockfish, and it kind of blends in. And so, again, it makes it harder for predators who are underneath a blue rockfish to actually see the blue rockfish. It disrupts their silhouette.

Milton Love:

So there’s been selection in many, many fishes, not just rockfish.

Hank Shaw:

Oh, yeah. Sharks are famous for that.

Milton Love:

Sharks are infamous for that. Tunas. I mean, almost all fish that live above the bottom have shiny, light-colored bellies. So yeah, I mean, people are pretty sure that that’s the reason.

Hank Shaw:

That makes sense.

Milton Love:

Yeah. But then, you have to ask, well, why is a… Oh, I’ll give you an example. So, there are really closely related rockfishes that live in, say, 300 feet of water. And a good example would be starries, which are gorgeous. They’re orange, and they usually have kind of profuse yellow spots, but sometimes they’re actually blue, which is kind of interesting. And so there are starries, and closely related to them would be rosies. Okay, so rosies are kind of purple-y and with kind of reddish vermiculations on them, and they’re pretty closely related. Well, and they live in the same reef. Well, why are they so vastly different if they live in the same reef and kind of do the same things? I mean, what was the selective advantage for looking really different? And there is no really good answer for those kinds of questions.

Hank Shaw:

Do they eat different things?

Milton Love:

No, probably not. By the way, it’s really hard to figure out what deep-water rockfish eat because they have swim bladders, which are essentially like little balloons inside their bodies, that are used for buoyancy. And when you bring a rockfish up, the gas inside the swim bladder expands. It’s like blowing a balloon up inside their bodies. And as you’ve seen over and over again, when that happens, it forces their stomach out their mouths.

Hank Shaw:

Oh yeah, that’s right.

Milton Love:

And that kicks out all of their food contents, so that a biologist who catches one goes, “Well, we can’t find anything their stomachs,” usually, “because they’ve basically coughed up everything.” And therefore, for a lot of these deep-water rockfishes, we really don’t know much about what they eat. You can kind of hypothesize. And occasionally, you find one with food still in the mouth, and so forth.

Milton Love:

By the way, for a long time, it was assumed that if you caught a rockfish and it had its mouth hanging out and its eyes were all bulgy, that if you sent it back down to depth, let’s say 300 feet, that that rockfish was dead, but it’s not true.

Hank Shaw:

Oh, wow.

Milton Love:

It turns out that in a majority of cases, in spite of the fact that that fish did not look happy-

Hank Shaw:

Totally.

Milton Love:

… it survives the experience, which is the reason that there’s now a whole industry for devices that will send your rockfish back down.

Hank Shaw:

Every single time I fish for rockfish, I set up two rods. One to catch them, one to bring them back down.

Milton Love:

Yeah, that’s really a good idea. They’re not all going to survive, but a majority will survive. Particularly if you catch them in, I don’t know, 60 feet of water, 100 feet, 120 feet. Then the survivorship goes… I mean, I don’t know, it’s 90%. The only exception is if you gut hook them, and that’s true of rockfish or fish in general.

Hank Shaw:

Well, yeah.

Milton Love:

If you gut hook them, then you’ve done so much interior damage that mortality rate’s super high. Or if you hook them in the gills or something like that, and there’s a lot of bleeding. But normally caught rockfish, if you take care, survivorship is surprisingly high, I should say.

Hank Shaw:

See, I use a descender, but I am in the minority of rockfishermen, because I know a bit about the biology. And I know that what everybody seems to want to do, which is to take-

Hank Shaw:

Now a bit about the biology. And I know that what everybody seems to want to do, which is to take a needle or a knife and poke that stomach and throw them overboard. That’s not good, is it?

Milton Love:

It’s not the best it, if you insist on doing that, there will be some percent that will survive, but it’s a much lower percent then than if you use descending gear of various sorts. Part of my PhD dissertation was to go out on party boats in Santa Barbara. I rode party boats once a week for three years and measured and identified every fish that was caught. And-

Hank Shaw:

They must have loved you because that’s got to be so much fun for an angler. Like, “Hey, what is this one?”

Milton Love:

Oh yeah. In fact that the crew loved me because I was a constant, I came out, I smoked dope with them on the way out. By the way, that was a little scientific experiment that I participated in.

Hank Shaw:

Oh for sea sickness?

Milton Love:

No, no, it was just for fun. So after a couple of times, I’d become not part of the crew necessarily, but a friend and I was sitting up in the wheelhouse, it’s seven o’clock in the morning and the Hornet was going out and skipper Frank and his brother, Tony, who was the deckhand, they were smoking a joint and Tony handed me the joint. And my only concern was for the scientific method, could I measure fish if I was just stoned out of my mind and it turns out that you can. The only thing is the passengers wonder what’s so damn funny.

Milton Love:

But short of that, indeed, you can. So I don’t even know how we got on this.

Hank Shaw:

You were measuring-

Milton Love:

Oh, I was measuring fish. Oh. And then poking holes. So I was also working on the life history of the olive rockfish and part of the life history is you try to figure out, well, do they move around at all? Do they migrate? And one of the ways you can do that is basically you take the fish and you stick a tag in the side of their body. And the tag has a little anchor that goes inside the fish, ideally crossways through these little bones that come out from their vertebra below their dorsal fin.

Hank Shaw:

Oh you go there, okay.

Milton Love:

And then on the tag, it looks like a little piece of spaghetti and it’s usually brightly colored. And on it was my name, a code number, oh oh seven. And then my phone number.

Milton Love:

And if you caught it, people would call me and go like, “Oh, I caught this fish here.” And I know where I tagged it. And I could figure out if it had moved or not. Well, the point is you got an olive rockfish in 50 feet of water and you bring it up and it’s all puffed up and you try to throw it back and a seagull gets it. So that’s ain’t no good. And there were no descender devices in 1974, but I had a syringe and I would pop it, run the needle through the side of the fish, into the swim bladder. And I would suck out the gas. You can just press on the fish, but it takes a long time. And I just wanted the fish into the damn water.

Hank Shaw:

I have seen tons of biologists do that actually.

Milton Love:

Oh yeah. And in fact, you can tell to a certain extent what species you have by the taste of the gas in their bodies. The archetypal taste is from boccaccio. Boccaccio, smell fruity, and they have a very distinct smell.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah they do.

Milton Love:

Different than any other rockfish. And the swim bladder tastes that way. What’s interesting about boccaccio is that they’re a very old species. Their nearest relative among the rockfishes is five or six million years old. I mean, they go way back. Whereas as I mentioned, black and yellows and gophers probably diverted 30,000 years ago. So you can hypothesize that, oh, well maybe six million or eight or 10 million years ago. And there were rockfishes here, 10, 12, 14, million years ago. Maybe that was a characteristic. Maybe they all smelled fruity for all we know. Anyway, so you suck on them. So the survivorship was pretty good based on the fact that I got a lot of tag returns. I would hypothesize however that if I stabbed him with a knife so that the wound was larger, not so good.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah.

Milton Love:

So on the other hand, if you’re on a party boat today, they probably frown on you coming out with a bunch of points and they think you’re a meth addict or something like that. So that’s not so good.

Hank Shaw:

Only biologists I’ve ever seen do that. Most guys will either use the end of a hook or the point of their knife, right where it’s bulging. I liked those pneumatic descenders. They’re 20 bucks. And if you attach it to a hundred pound mono, you’re never going to lose it. And the fish always swim away. Because you can tell when you descend them, it’s nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then all of a sudden it wakes up and then it pops away.

Milton Love:

I participated in a video called, what’s it called, Rockfish Barau Trauma, something like that, which was a video that just talks about descenders and why you should use them and the different kinds of descenders and the woman who created it and got the bucks to pay for asked me to be in it. And I said, “Well, I don’t really want to be in it, but I have a rockfish puppet that would love to be in it.” So the rockfish puppet was in it and kind of introduced the whole video. I think it’s called Rockfish Barau Trauma. If you do that, it’s B A R A U Barau trauma. It’ll show up. And Rachel, who is the fabulous Ketchikan artist who does lots of art, I mean, hundreds of pieces t-shirts and so forth with rockfishes and salmon, by the way-

Hank Shaw:

[crosstalk 00:33:22] your book, right?

Milton Love:

Yeah. Yeah. The cover of the rockfish book is Rachel painting and Ray’s a trip, man. He’s in a league by himself. I hate salmon. I just think that they’re dorky fish and-

Hank Shaw:

Biologists have these crazy- you love what you’re studying. Of course. And then it’s like Yankees and the Red Sox kind of weird rivalries between-

Milton Love:

Sure. The thing about a salmon. First of all, is they’re one trick ponies and they’re not even very good at that one trick. They’re born in fresh water. And then depending on the species, they go into salt water for two to six years. And then in theory, they come back to the same damn place to reproduce. Well, it turns out they’re not even actually very good at that.

Hank Shaw:

No they’re not.

Milton Love:

Now there’s actually a lot of straying as you know, to different creeks and rivers. And so that’s it, man.

Hank Shaw:

Do you want to hear a good one?

Milton Love:

Yeah, sure.

Hank Shaw:

So a guide friend of mine, speaking of wayward salmon, a guide friend of mine was fishing the feather river two years ago and his client caught a pink.

Milton Love:

So that is unusual. There used to be, before people screwed up all of the rivers, there was this very small pink run in Northern California and a sustainable one. And then we insist on putting dams across everything and logging the riverside. So there’s erosion and blah, blah, blah. And that was extirpated. So in theory, that’s how you can bring back pinks is just by straying. So Ray invites me to give a talk. I give kind of a fish talk, I talk about an interesting fish. He said, “Well, here in catch cam we’ve got an auditorium, a monthly meeting. Why don’t you come up? You’re going to be in Sitka anyway for a meeting. Why don’t you just fly over to Ketchikan? I’ll pick you up. You can say my house and give a talk.” And I went, “Okay, cool.”

Milton Love:

So two weeks before the talk, the local newspaper calls me up and they want to do an interview, fine. And I give my little spiel about how much I hate salmon. I said, they’re dorky fish. And I feel like any fish that can’t hurt you when you catch them is just dumb. And a salmon can’t do anything. It could give you a hickey, probably. So I did my song and dance and felt good. And then Ray picked me up at the Ketchikan airport. And he said, “Well, you managed to offend the entire town of Ketchikan.” By saying bad things about salmon, because salmon really are important to people in Southeast Alaska and British Columbia. Major economic species. So I went, “Well, what can I do? What do you want me to do?”

Milton Love:

He said, “I want you to apologize.” And I said, “How do you apologize the whole town?” He said, “Well, we have a public radio station and I’ve scheduled you for 4:30 to apologize to the town.” And I thought to myself, well I’ve had four years of therapy. I can apologize to anybody about anything. So sure enough, they had a kind of community spot and I apologized. [inaudible 00:36:34] I’m a bad boy, blah, blah, blah. But I still don’t like salmon. I just think they’re stupid. The other thing about salmon, the thing I really hate is if I tried to get money for rockfish research, biological research, that would be super hard. But if you’re working on salmon, because we have screwed up things so badly, money just rains down from the sky. Tens and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, how can we bring salmon back?

Milton Love:

And the answer is, well, you just do away with the dams. And that’s a huge part. You do away with the dams and the salmon can go back to where they used to spawn and you’re going to get more salmon. People don’t want to do away with the dams, which to a certain extent is understandable. But why should we pour more money into salmon research when I’ve just told you the answer for nothing. So I just hate that. I hate that all that money is just going, it’s like taking one $20 bill and napalming it every second. Bam, bam, bam. It’s horrible.

Hank Shaw:

So that just brought up two interesting points. I want to start with the first one. So any fish that can’t hurt you, so everybody who’s ever caught a rockfish knows that they’re a little bit prickly and-

Milton Love:

Yes they are.

Hank Shaw:

I read in your book that many of them in fact do have some kind of venom involved in [crosstalk 00:38:00].

Milton Love:

Yes.

Hank Shaw:

So talk about that for a second, because it’s always something on the boat that people, “Are they poisonous or not?” Everyone knows that if you get jabbed, it’s going to get infected in 3, 2, 1, and then there it is.

Milton Love:

I know, it hurts. So, the first thing is that rockfish are derived, we don’t know, 20, 30 million years ago from scorpion fishes, from tropical scorpion fishes, probably off of the Philippines someplace like that. And that’s where the ancestor rockfish came from. So those scorpion fishes, they were just loaded with venom. Every single spine had a gland at its base that produced venom and a little channel that ran all the way up the spine. And there was nobody around, but if you were there or if you get stung by a stone fish or a scorpion fish today, that little bit of tissue that runs all the way up the spine that gets into your body and excretes or secretes that venom. And in case of stone fishes, people die, particularly before antivenom mortality rate is 50%. So those tropical scorpion stone fishes, those were and are super venomous.

Milton Love:

Rockfishes, over the millennia and over the millions of years, have lost a lot of that venom capability. And it depends on the species of rockfish. They’ve only actually looked at maybe 12 species of rockfish. So we don’t know how much venom most of them have, but almost certainly almost every rockfish. Some of those spines, the dorsal spines, the anal spines and there’s one on the pelvic fin has this venom gland. By the way, the spines on the cheeks don’t have venom. So the first thing happens is of course it hurts because you’ve been pricked by something sharp. And the second thing is since many of these spines have a venom, you will feel the effects. Some people seem to be more sensitive than others, but almost everybody agrees that if you get stung by a boccaccio, for instance, it will hurt.

Hank Shaw:

Or a quillback.

Milton Love:

Or a quillback. And it’ll hurt more than just being pricked by a sharp object. And I was a deckhand for a while in Santa Monica, I’ve been stung. I was never stung by the scorpion fish that lives out here, but I’ve been stung dozens of times by rockfishes. I don’t have this story, but almost every deckhand who’s worked off California has what I call a fester story, which basically involves a passenger swings four rockfishes over the side and it hits the deckhand in the kneecap or some other place. And, I don’t know, in the great stories the spine snaps off and it’s in there and it festers and puss forms and the guy takes a filet knife and slashes at it and puss is dripping down into his boot or stories to that effect. Those are real stories.

Hank Shaw:

Oh yeah. I can attest. I had it in the fleshy part between my thumb and forefinger on my right hand. And it wasn’t that huge, but I did need a knife to cut this thing and then boink, there was the end of the spine.

Milton Love:

Yeah. Okay. Well, I’ve never actually had that. I’ve had infections from rockfish, but I’ve never had the play- I’ve had a hook go from a treble hook from a rocket jet go into my forefinger and I had to cut the hook off and then go to the emergency hospital and have it cut out. But I’ve never had a fester story like yours, kind of the classic fester story.

Hank Shaw:

No bueno.

Milton Love:

Congratulations though.

Hank Shaw:

Yay.

Milton Love:

It’s a badge of honor. I should probably go out right now and get stung. So now I feel bad, now I feel jealous and angry at you.

Hank Shaw:

You’ll get over, I think.

Milton Love:

Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Hank Shaw:

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Hank Shaw:

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Hank Shaw:

So the second thing that you brought up was about money raining from the sky for salmon, but the fact of the matter is rockfish are a commercial species too. And one of the things that people definitely are interested in knowing about is, well, okay, so we know that some of them can live forever more or less.

Milton Love:

Yes.

Hank Shaw:

And we know that there was a crash of rockfish. Was it 20 years ago maybe?

Milton Love:

Yeah. Ish.

Hank Shaw:

Ish. So talk about commercial rockfishing and how that can be done or is done or have we stabilized? Do we have a normal kind of sustainable rockfishery here.

Milton Love:

Okay.

Hank Shaw:

And then I’m also interested in, do you think those protected areas are working?

Milton Love:

So what happened? Okay. Let’s take even a further step back, as you said, most of the rockfish on the, let’s just say the Pacific coast from Washington to Baja, California, most of them are economically important. They are commercial species and or they are recreational species. And I’m going to lump recreational fishing in with commercial fishing, because there are so many recreational anglers basically off California that they can do just as much damage to some species, not all of them, but some as commercial fishermen. So what happened? Well, everything was fine until seventies and eighties. So what happened to the rockfish populations in the seventies and eighties? Well, the first thing that happened is that draggers, commercial trollers used to be limited to where they could drag. They could only drag on mud and sand because if they dragged over rocks it would tear up their gear and most rockfish live over rocks. So that was good.

Milton Love:

So for a while only hook and liners caught rockfish, eaten both commercial and recreational, and that was pretty sustainable. So then the first thing that happened was draggers developed roller gear, which is basically humongous tires. All right. So all of a sudden you had humongous tires bouncing around over rocks and all of a sudden rockfish that were protected by the rocks, no longer protected. So that wasn’t good. Second thing is that it used to be that the only kind of gillnets that were available until the late sixties were made out of either cotton or other artificial material, but they were really expensive. So the typical trammel net people, gillnet people, no bueno, you don’t want to put them on rocks because it’ll tear it up and it costs too much money. Well then they developed a monofilament gillnets cheap, really cheap.

Milton Love:

And so everybody who was interested in gillnetting switched over to a monofilament. Fish can’t see it, it’s cheap. You can lay them right on rocks. And if it tears up, who cares. And so all of a sudden the rockfish are going like, “Well, this sucks, man. All of a sudden they’re catching all of us.” And indeed we were. The other thing was that electronics got a lot better. Used to be back in the sixties when I was a kid and a deckhand fishing in Santa Monica and the spots were 10 miles out or in Winfield, the skipper, he had a compass and he had a depth finder. That was all he had. He didn’t have LORAN, he didn’t have GPS, he didn’t have radar. And so if it was foggy and he tried to find the spots 10 miles out, he couldn’t see any landmarks.

Milton Love:

So it was hard to go back to the same place over and over and over again. Well, all of a sudden a radar LORAN came in, LORAN was good but not great. And all of a sudden there was GPS and any schmuck with a rowboat could go back to the same rock over and over again, and just pound these reefs. So all of those things led to massive overfishing all up and down the coast. And again, Washington through California, because we actually don’t know the state of stocks in Mexico. There are no stock assessments, really in Mexico.

Hank Shaw:

It’s not a very popular fish there.

Milton Love:

It depends. The artisinal fisheries off of Ensonata for instance, and between Ensonata and Punta Banda and all the way down to east Los Cedros, all those folks that fish mainly hook and line, but with gillnet, they catch a lot of rockfish and most of them are then sent to the Mercado Negro, the huge black market.

Milton Love:

I mean, black market, not in an illegal sense, but it’s painted black in Ensonata. So you go there and there’s 40 or 50 stalls, different vendors. There’s a ton of rockfish there. So, but most of what we know was on our Pacific coast. And so by the nineties, when the national Marine fishery service finally wised up and started doing stock assessments, really good ones, all of a sudden they’re going like, wow, calicut down to 3% of their unfinished levels and boccaccio down to seven and yellow eye down to 2%. And so there was a small group of rockfishes that were terribly over-fished. There’s a kind of a cutoff at 20% below unfinished levels. When you’re down to 20%, then the federal government legally has to take draconian measures. And so they did. So basically there were teeny quotas, bycatch quotas.

Milton Love:

And, if the hake fishery you’re targeting hake, but you got widows, as soon as that tiny widow bycatch allowable limit was reached, then the whole hake fishery was shut down. So it had profound effects and the models said that, “Oh, well, this may take a century to bring these fish back.” But I think to most people’s intense surprise, the fish came back really fast and within, let’s say, I can’t remember when these were installed, I think it was probably the mid nineties by 2015 or so all the populations other than yellow eyes, I think-

Hank Shaw:

And calicut.

Milton Love:

Calicut are now rebuilt-

Hank Shaw:

We still can’t keep them.

Milton Love:

Yeah you can, I mean, you can keep very small numbers. So that is-

Hank Shaw:

Not where I live.

Milton Love:

So here’s the deal.

Hank Shaw:

Okay.

Milton Love:

So finish the thought. So the populations now are back above the magic 20%, which is still, I mean, it’s not fabulous, but it’s better than it was. So the sox have mostly been quote unquote rebuilt. So now there is a certain move in Sacramento to allow, and they’ve loosened the regulations on boccaccio and-

Hank Shaw:

Canaries for sure.

Milton Love:

Canaries for sure.. And widows. By the way, link cod were over-fished. Those came back real fast. Much faster.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. It was a little side note. Remember that one year, four years ago where they let us take three a day.

Milton Love:

Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

That was a mistake.

Milton Love:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, that brings up your point about calicut. So one of the guys who works for me, part-time, Merritt McCray used to own a sport fishing party boat for decades, ran a boat. And so he’s kind of the go-to person to talk about how recreational anglers, particularly people who own party boats, how they feel about different regulations. And we were talking a few months ago about calicut and he said, “Yeah, there there’s this kind of move to loosen the calicut rigs.” He said, “But my associates are totally against it.” I’m going like, “Well, why?” He said, “Well, what we think is going to happen is they’re going to loosen to regs, not totally, but there’s going to be a larger quota and they’ll meet the quota. They’ll kind of shoot over the quota and then they will just hammer us again.” Not us in his sense, but they’re going to hammer the industry again.

Milton Love:

And we’ll go back to the bad old days of tiny bycatch and more regulation. So he said some of the guys who run the party boats, they don’t want the regulations changed at all. And so we’ll see, I don’t know how it’s going to play out. But a lot of my research used to be to look at the fishes that live around oil platforms off California. And we did scuba surveys on most of them, but we also used a little two-person submarine. It’d be me or someone else in my lab and a pilot. And that’s how we surveyed the fishes that lived in the deeper parts of these platforms. Platforms go down to about 1300 feet of water.

Hank Shaw:

Oh wow.

Milton Love:

And so we would look at the fish populations around platforms and then also natural reefs. And you could see starting, we started in 95, that by 2011 when we finished that things like boccaccios and to a certain extent, calicuts, we were seeing more of them.

Milton Love:

There was no question that these rigs kind of worked some aspect. Now to your point about how well marine protected areas are working. And by the way, I just stay clear of that whole topic because that’s a losing proposition coming out and talking about MPAs. Someone’s going to hate you. And, I’m just too old and tired to have people hate on me. And I remember when the calicut conservation areas were created, I used to read these recreational anglers websites, bloody decks or bloody heads or bloody something. And there was a couple others, and I remember reading one, hoping saying they hoped I would die, me, Milton Love.

Milton Love:

… once saying they hoped I would die. Me, Milton Love. And I’m going, “What the hell is that about?”

Hank Shaw:

Geez.

Milton Love:

And they blame me. They blamed my research for Cowcod Conservation Area. And I’m going, “What? Come on?” So, at that point, I thought there’s no upside to raising my head above the parapet, because it’s just going to get shot off. I’m happy to talk about marine protected areas, but I’ve played no role in creation or anything about that.

Hank Shaw:

Well, I say from a angler’s perspective, since they were put in, the rockfishing’s been better. This is in my area. I mean, that’s just anecdotal.

Milton Love:

So that is anecdotal, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true. Anecdotes often have some basis in truth. Sometimes they have no basis. We’ll come back to marine protected areas, but I’ll give you an example where they have no basis in truth. When they were going to set up the Cowcod Conservation Area, which was designed to protect cowcod, and is basically a bunch of banks, outer banks, in Southern California, Cortes and Tanner, the 60-mile bank, places like that. The California fishery commission got a letter from hook and line rockfish commercial fishermen. I won’t name him. I think he’s still alive, don’t want to embarrass him.

Milton Love:

And he said, basically, there are plenty of cowcod. This is just stupid. Plenty of cowcod.” He said, “I can go out to Cortes Bank and basically fill my boat up with cowcod.” And he did the math. He said, “In one acre, I caught X number of cowcod,” doesn’t matter. And he said, “And the Cortes Bank is,” whatever it is, “… a hundred thousand acres. So if you multiply the number of cowcod I caught in an acre with a hundred thousand acres, you come up with this humongous number of cowcod.” He said, “There’s no problem.” And I remember at some meeting, I said, “So you randomly just drift across the bank.” And he said, “Oh, no, no, no. There’s just a few spots that have all these cowcod.” To myself, I went, “This is no use. This is no fucking use.”

Hank Shaw:

Well, you found the one spot.

Milton Love:

Yeah. And indeed there are spots. We took the submarine out to Cortes. A lot of it no cowcod, but there are some spots where you’re going, “Oh shit, look at all these cowcod. Oh my god.” In that letter, parenthetically, there was another thing which was, “Why don’t have hatcheries for rockfish, for cowcods?” And he said, “It’s done with salmon and you could just take cowcod sperm and cowcod eggs, basically, you can create little baby cowcod.” And he didn’t realize that rockfishes have internal fertilization. They’re like humans, and what he was suggesting-

Hank Shaw:

Or leopard sharks.

Milton Love:

… Or like most of the shark.

Hank Shaw:

And surfperches, too.

Milton Love:

And surfperches. Right. And so, he was basically saying, “You want another human? You could take an egg and put it in a Petri dish, and a sperm and you get a fertilized egg, and after nine months, you just watch that Petri dish and you’ll get a baby.” I mean, that’s exactly the equivalent. And I remember, actually I-

Hank Shaw:

I think it should be sci-fi movie.

Milton Love:

It would be a trippy sci-fi movie, and maybe we can monetize this, you and I. And we can find some 20-year-old who runs a Hollywood studio and make a pitch, and just take the money and run is what we would do.

Hank Shaw:

Seems like a good… And then go rock fishing.

Milton Love:

And then go rock cod fishing. So, anyway, there are basically two broad, well, there’s actually three broad exclusion zones that have been created, types of zones. There was the Cowcod Conservation Area, which is designed, initially, purely for cowcod, but had the effect of protecting other fishes. There are these series of MPAs, marine protected areas, that dot the near shore area along California. And then, there are these depth exclusion areas. And I can’t even keep track of what they are anymore.

Hank Shaw:

Oh, they just loosened up this year.

Milton Love:

So what are they now? 360 to something you can’t catch fish?

Hank Shaw:

SoCal can fish really deep now, which is cool.

Milton Love:

Right. Okay. So in the bad, old times, I can’t remember, you couldn’t fish deeper than 180 or something.

Hank Shaw:

100 feet, or… Yeah, like that.

Milton Love:

It was, again, draconian. So there’s all of these different kinds of regulatory bodies. And I don’t think there’s any question that if you combine all of these things, yeah, I’m sure that had an effect on bringing rockfishes back and lingcod back. Now, which of them was most important or did you have to have them all? I don’t know. What it comes down to is, if you catch less of a species, then the species usually benefits. And you can catch less of a species by creating a marine protected area, you can catch less of a species by just having a really low quota, you can do it by size class, you can do it by gear type, lot of ways you can do it. It turns out that with rockfishes, the greatest benefit to the population is not catching the big ones, because the larger a female is, the healthier the larvae are.

Hank Shaw:

Quick question, it’s my, I don’t know, just my observation, and I don’t know if this entirely true and you might know, is it true that in all fish species, or at least all game, pretty normal game fish species, that the big giant ones are always the big breeding females? Because I know this is stripers, sharks, halibut, a few other fish, where if it’s a big, giant individual, it’s likely a big breeding female.

Milton Love:

So actually, what you’re asking is, do females grow larger than males?

Hank Shaw:

Yeah.

Milton Love:

Yes. Okay. And in many species, absolutely they do. In rockfishes, usually not. Having said that, there are a few species where the females get larger than males. There are no rockfishes where the males get larger than females. The flip side can be said in the sheephead where fishes start out as females. When they mature they’re females, right?

Hank Shaw:

The pinky wrasses.

Milton Love:

Yeah. And so, when they get to be a certain size and age, they become males. And that’s true for parrotfishes. Parrotfishes and wrasses are now in the same family. So not all the wrasses change sex.

Hank Shaw:

I don’t think the tautog do.

Milton Love:

I don’t think they do either. And in fact, senorita, the little cigar shape, pinky wrasse that lives in Southern California, they don’t change. On the other hand, rock wrasses, which live in Southern California, they do. So it’s a mixed bag. So to answer your question, if a gender gets bigger than the other gender in a species, it tends to be female. It gets bigger, but that’s not always true.

Milton Love:

So back to marine protected areas, my feeling is I would never promise anybody anything about a marine protected area. I was sitting at a meeting with James Bohnsack, who works at the national fishery service, he’s one of the first people who suggested marine protected areas. And back in the, I don’t even know, back in the ’80s. That’s what he told me. He said, “I never promise that there’s going to be bigger fish inside, and that the bigger fish will spill over outside and the fishing will be better.”

Milton Love:

He said, “No, no, no, no, no.” He said, “What I say is it’s the right thing to do.” And he goes, “Like Yosemite. It was the right thing to do. And no one promised that the mule deer population, or whatever they’ve got there, will spill over from Yosemite into the adjacent area, people can shoot them. No one ever suggests that. They just said, ‘This is a really cool place. Let’s protect it.'”

Milton Love:

And so that’s my feeling is that if someone suggests a marine protected area, I’ll go like, “Well, is this a really place? Yeah. All right, so maybe we should protect it.” I just don’t fall on the side of, well, we got to protect everything. I was a commercial fishermen. I was a sport fishermen. I liked both industries. I think they should both survive, but they have to share the ocean with everybody else, including the fish. The hardest thing for humans to be, and one of the reasons we have global warming, the hardest thing for people to be is moderate in their behavior.

Hank Shaw:

True.

Milton Love:

Because that takes using the non-reptilian part of your brain, your forebrain, to overrule the, “I want to eat a pound and a half of chocolate right now.” And it’s very hard to over… Like me with cheesecake. I mean, one piece is that all? And my brain is screaming at me, “Two pieces, three pieces.” So it’s the same thing with other behaviors, including fishing.

Milton Love:

I remember hearing… No, I must’ve been at a very early MPA meeting up in Eureka, and a recreational angler said, I swear to God, this is true. He said, “If you prevent anglers from,” and they were talking to like a particular reef. “If you prevent anglers from fishing there, they’ll go home and beat their wives.” And I remember… And you know what? Maybe here’s a germ… I mean, I’m sure that that’s not true as stated. But what he was saying is they’re going to be really angry. And again, it’s that “Well, can’t we be moderate about things? What happened to that?”

Hank Shaw:

So I got a question about cowcod, because I have never caught one. Because they’ve never been legal to catch in the, I don’t know, what is it, 18 years I’ve lived here in the West Coast? What’s the big deal about them? Are they like yellow eyes in the sense that they’re just big, giant, fun-to-eat rockfish?

Milton Love:

Well, sure. But there’s more to it. I mean, I’ll just tell you from my personal experience. I have a tattoo of a cowcod on my upper right arm. I have two fish tattoos and one of them is a cowcod. The first one I got was a cowcod. And it was because, first of all, in Southern California, they are the biggest, one of the biggest fish. I mean, obviously, there are black sea bass and stuff like that, but they were one of the biggest fish that a normal angler could catch, someone who did not go out to Catalina and catch yellow tail. They were one of the big fish. They were the biggest bottom fish.

Milton Love:

And they’re really striking, their reds and yellows and pinks. They got huge fins and a massive mouth, and on a typical party boat, they were the jackpot. And they weren’t even very common at the time, so you also had that rarity aspect. In many cases with rockfish, you never even knew you had them. In the days before SpiderWire, Spider-Line, when you had monofilament filling your fluoro or dacron, and you were fishing in 600 feet of water, it was hard to know that you actually had anything on your line. It was heavier. You got a cowcod, and you at least know, “Oh my God, I got something,” or “I’m snagged,” one of the two. I can’t tell.

Hank Shaw:

They’re the grouper of the area.

Milton Love:

They are. Exactly. The grouper of the area. And once I started going down the little sub and seeing them in action, they’re hilarious, because they primarily live in caves and crevices. And in a number of cases, they would see the sub coming and they would stick their heads in a cave. The rest of their body is out. It looked like a cartoon of an ostrich. And so, you would just see this, a 20-pound fish with their butts sticking out of a cave, but yep, they must be safe because they couldn’t see you. They’re just hilarious fish. I just love them so much.

Milton Love:

I remember just deciding that I was going to get a fish tattoo. Let’s see, my daughter’s 43, and she was about 12, so this is whatever it was, 30 years ago. And I told them I was going to get a tattoo, and my daughter said, “Oh, you’re going to want a dozen of them.” And my son, who was 10 at the time, he said, “Well, where are you going to get it?” And I said, “I don’t know. My arm probably.” He said, “Well, if you don’t like it, you can always gnaw it off.” Which is a key to their personality types, even today. So I did. I got it from James McDermott at, what was it called? The Upstairs tattoo parlor on Front Street in Santa Cruz. It was cool. I love tattoos. Do you have a tattoo?

Hank Shaw:

I have one. It’s my family’s coat of arms on my right shoulder.

Milton Love:

All right, see, that’s great. But-

Hank Shaw:

Because I figure I’ll be a billion years old and they’ll still be a Shaw.

Milton Love:

So, you should probably get a rockfish tattoo.

Hank Shaw:

Well, I mean, I hate to disappoint you, but I’ve been thinking about getting the salmon of knowledge, because I’ve of Scottish extraction.

Milton Love:

What is the salmon of… I have no idea what that is.

Hank Shaw:

Well, it’s an Atlantic salmon, for starters.

Milton Love:

But what’s the knowledge part?

Hank Shaw:

In Celtic mythology, he is the bringer of wisdom.

Milton Love:

Ah. So, why don’t you get the rockfish of knowledge, which in Milton Love mythology is the bringer of sex.

Hank Shaw:

It would have to be a China cod then.

Milton Love:

Absolutely. China rockfish? Fabulous. Oh my God.

Hank Shaw:

So, okay, I bring that up because it is my favorite rockfish to eat and they are super cool to look at. I definitely want to talk about what are the eating differences between the rockfishes? I will tell people they’re all fine, they’re all pretty similar, but then, if I get to talking to someone like you or somebody like Johnny [Ucomezo 01:09:19] or people who really know rockfish, yes, there are differences. So I’ll start with China cod have a finer texture.

Milton Love:

Yes.

Hank Shaw:

And bocaccio have a grouper-like consistency.

Milton Love:

So, my question for you is, other than texture, can you tell rockfish apart if they were all… Let’s just take an example. Let’s say we randomly, we took muscle from, a little cube of muscle from the same part of a rockfish’s body and we had 10 different species, a little cube, and we dip them all in oil, so they’re all cooked, and we put them out in a plate, could you tell the difference in taste?

Hank Shaw:

I think, for me, it would be, I would know differences by flake and texture. So I would be able to pick a bocaccio out. I would probably be able to pick a China cod out, and then, I could probably also pick out, “Oh, well, that’s a big ass something.” So probably a vermilion or a yelloweye, or something like that.

Milton Love:

Right. And that’s precisely it. As far as I know, it’s all textural differences. And all of us who are in this business have participated in those kind of tastes-off. In fact, just before COVID hit, no, not just before, but two years ago, I’m staring at my lab… We have a backyard here, and we have a friend who’s a commercial fishermen. He brought in 11 species of rockfish, and he pan-fried every single one of them, and everybody in the lab and some friends, we all drank wine and tried to figure out which one we liked the best.

Milton Love:

And it turned out it was all textural. And I hadn’t done that in a long time. And by golly, there were ones, like ovalis, a speckled rockfish, which is built like a blue rockfish. I’m going, “Ugh, mushy, not so good.” But bocaccis are really firm and they chew back. You chew on them and there’s not a lot of give. But that was my-

Hank Shaw:

That’s what makes them… They’re also called salmon grouper.

Milton Love:

They are. They are called salmon grouper.

Hank Shaw:

And I’m like, “Why in the hell would you call those the salmon grouper? It’s neither.” Actually, if you put it right next to a scamp, a scamp grouper, they’re very similar in texture.

Milton Love:

Yeah. Right. And so, my wife really likes soft fish. She likes…

Hank Shaw:

Like blues?

Milton Love:

Well, she likes English sole and Dover sole and blues. I just like them to fight back a little bit. And so, to the point, all the bottom fish, their musculature, and no one has actually ever looked on the cellular level, but the bottom rockfish, they tend to have flakier muscles, muscles that flake when they’re cooked, and the fishes that school, like blues and Johnny Bass, all of rockfish, they tend to have that, to me, mushier texture.

Milton Love:

And then, cowcod fit in with those bottom ones. Cowcod, it’s interesting, an associate of mine, Mike Wagner, used to be a fish processor. He was very creative. He’s the guy who started, really started the angelshark fishery, and started in a big way, the uni, the sea urchin fishery, so he was very creative. And some of his creations were that people would bring in, fishermen would bring in cowcod and he would sell them as white seabass. Very creative, very creative man. And no one ever came back and went, “Well, wait a minute. This isn’t a white seabass.” Yeah, he-

Hank Shaw:

So that tells me that a cowcod has a very, very texture than a vermilion.

Milton Love:

Right. Now, vermilions, as you pointed out, they have a very different texture. And if you actually look at what they do, how they behave, they behave differently than a lot of other rockfish. You can generally lump rockfish into the ones that just sit and don’t do anything. I shouldn’t say sit, sometimes they do. They actually rest right on the bottom, but a lot of times they hover two or three feet above the bottom. You almost never see some of these species more than six feet above the bottom, but they’re just not doing anything. And that’s the…

Hank Shaw:

The hardheads.

Milton Love:

Well, like the Chinas. Chinas actually, they do sit a lot. Chinas, gophers black and yellows, they’ll just sit, starries and things like that, they’ll sit. And then, you have the ones that are actually swimming around and that’s the blues, bocaccis, actually, will swim around to a certain extent. But then you have canaries and vermilions, and then there’s a newly described species that looks like a vermilion, the sunset rockfish. And they-

Hank Shaw:

Chilipeppers, too?

Milton Love:

Chilies act like bocaccis. Right. So they’re swimming around. And you’ll find chilies, oh my goodness, you’ll find chilies 20, 30, 40 feet above the bottom, in schools sometimes. I love chilies because they’re really easy to filet. As a deckhand-

Hank Shaw:

Yes.

Milton Love:

… man…

Hank Shaw:

Blues and blacks.

Milton Love:

Blues-

Hank Shaw:

Done.

Milton Love:

… blacks, olives, chilies. As opposed to coppers, which not only never die, so they’re-

Hank Shaw:

They never die. You’re so right.

Milton Love:

… They’re fucking spining you and they’re dulling your knife. I just hate them. And there are times I remember-

Hank Shaw:

I’ve caught limits of them.

Milton Love:

Well, exactly. And in Santa Barbara, poor deck hands, we’ll have gunnysacks filled with coppers. Oh my God. So reds and canaries, things like that, they’re in between what they do. They’re aggregating, so they’re not solitary, like starries and so forth. They’re aggregating and they’re right above the bottom, but they’re moving around. So it’s that in-between behavior. I mean, I’ve seen, off of Big Creek, which is a reserve off the Big Sur coast, in maybe, how deep were we? I don’t know, 200 feet of water. I’ve seen schools of hundreds of reds, adult reds, all just milling around, moving around. So that may lead to a different texture in their muscles.

Hank Shaw:

It could be. Yeah, I’m actually pretty hopeful about our rockfishing situation right now. We seem to be doing well. The catches are good. I mean, I don’t get the sense that we’re on a bubble, but I could be wrong.

Milton Love:

Well, I mean, it totally depends on the M-word, moderation. A lot of that will come down from on high. We’ll just have to see what the managers allow commercial fishermen and recreational anglers to take. This year, I think it was this year, maybe it was last year, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council, which really oversees much of the commercial fisheries on the Pacific coast, there was a move to open some of the previously off-limits area to trawling. And I can’t remember all the details, because it’s just not my area, but there was going to be a trade-off. So the commercial fishermen were going to give up certain areas to be allowed to drag in other areas.

Hank Shaw:

Oh, to give the other places a rest.

Milton Love:

I guess. I’ve learned the hard way not to go like, “Oh yeah,” because I’m not sure, but there was a compromise reached. And so, the question is, “Welp, what’s going to happen in those areas where they’re going to allow dragging?” And the great problem, which is less of a problem now, but it’s still there, and I used to see this at the council meetings back in the ’70s, the ’80s, I’d go. If they were in Sacramento, I’d go and visit.

Milton Love:

The way the regulations were created is that there would be a group of fisheries’ biologists, and they would be assigned, “You got to do a stock assessment of widow rockfish.” So you’d go out there and you do your best, but you don’t know exactly how many widow rockfish. You don’t have the data. And even if you had a lot of data, what you would do is you would bracket it. You would go like, “Okay, there’s X hundred thousand metric tons of widows out there,” but it could be this high or it could be this low. And then, you would give that number to the council.

Milton Love:

Council is made up, there’s essentially no biologists on the council. It’s representatives of the commercial industry, representatives recreational industry, somebody from fish and game, Oregon Fish and Wildlife, flah, flah, flah. And so, the council’s sitting up there and they have this number, it could be as high as this or it could be as low as this, but there’s this middle number. And then, you open it up to comment and you would have the Oregon Trawlers Association come in, these guys with big gold chains and they would go, “Well, you can’t lower the quota. My kids are going to starve. They’re going to live under a bridge. I’m going to have to sell them into prostitution.”

Milton Love:

And it’s really hard for a bunch of people to sit up there and listen to commercial fishermen, and sometimes recreational fishermen, talk about having to sell their eldest son into gay prostitution. I mean, it’s hard. You have to be very hard-nosed to go, “Well, fuck them. I’m sorry, the widow rockfish are more important than your eldest son who, by the way, can fend for himself when he’s 18.” What they would almost inevitably do is they would go, “Well, maybe there’s more. Maybe it’s the higher limit or, at the very least, it’s the middle limit.”

Milton Love:

For decades, there was really no attempt to lower the quotas down to something that might be, it turns out, sustainable. So there was a lot of unsustainable fisheries back then. Now, people actually have wised up, even the council has wised up. So, to your point about whether things are sustainable, yeah, maybe. The other huge unknown, massive unknown, is what effect global warming is going to have in the ocean.

Milton Love:

So there are two, three major effects that are going to happen and are happening now. Two of them, no question are happening now, and one is looming, probably looming, in the future. So the ones that are happening now is oxygen shoaling. So in oxygen shoaling, you have deoxygenated water, water that is deep and has very little oxygen. It’s getting shallower every single… I shouldn’t say that. Over time, it’s tending to go shallower and shallower and shallower. And that happens right now off Oregon where you-

Milton Love:

And that happens like right now off Oregon, where you have these tongues of deoxygenated water coming in and it drives fish into shallower and shallower water. And that’s actually starting to happen off California. We just published, not yet, on the 16th of September, I was involved in a study at the Footprint, which is a fabulous reef. Oh my God. It’s my favorite reef on the whole planet, sits just outside Santa Cruz Island, and it comes up to about, I got to translate here, about 300 feet, and it’s all rocky. You can run your sub into a cave. And then it shoots down to about a thousand feet of water, so a lot of depth. It used to be covered in fish in the sixties. I know, because I used to fish there. And then it’s now a marine protected area and fish are probably coming back.

Milton Love:

Anyway, got a lot of fish, but what we did, and I used to do surveys there from 1995 to 2011 at different depths. And we showed that many of the species on average are getting shallower and shallower and shallower over time. And that’s probably due to the fact that this low oxygen is driving them upwards. So well, why is that a problem? Well, eventually in theory, you’re going to run out of habitat. At some point, the bocaccio are going to be at the top of this feature in the worst case scenario, and they’re going to go like, I can’t breathe. And what’s going to happen then? Even if that doesn’t happen, you’re going to compress. It’s called habitat compression. You’re going to compress the bocaccio habitat into smaller and smaller areas. So why is that a problem?

Milton Love:

Well, the management decisions right now are based on assumptions about where bocaccio live. If they no longer live there, if they live in a smaller area, you’re going to have to change the management policies. So that’s the first thing, which is happening. The second thing is ocean acidification. So ocean is getting more and more acid because ocean is absorbing carbon dioxide and it changes the acidity of the ocean. The pH is getting lower, which means it’s getting more acid. Why is that a problem? Well, a lot of shelled organisms, they-

Hank Shaw:

Oh yeah, that’s right. It messes with their shells.

Milton Love:

Yes. And usually that’s at the larval level. They cannot create shells in highly acidic seawater conditions. So is that going to affect our little bocaccio? No. Probably.

Hank Shaw:

It’s going to affect what it eats.

Milton Love:

It’s going to affect what it eats and it’s going to affect its habitat. For instance, there’s some evidence that rockfishes really liked to associate with sponges and deep water corals. Well, what’s going to happen when it gets really acidic, are deep water corals going to be able to maintain themselves or are they going to basically fall apart. If that happens, well, what does the bocaccio associate with? Well, probably rocks, but is it going to be really happy or would it have been more happy with the things that have fallen apart? You can see that that’s a big unknown, but that’s another problem.

Milton Love:

The other problem is raise in temperature, ocean temperature, and we are getting these really weird situations like the blob that was out in the Northeast Pacific, this big pool of relatively hot water. And what tends to happen during warm water periods like El Ninos is that most species of rockfish, they don’t reproduce well. And fortunately for us, El Ninos last a year, year and a half, two years, and then the water gets cold again and the rockfishes are happily reproducing.

Milton Love:

Well, what happens if this is a permanent condition? The good news is it’s probably good for tropical fish and they’re used to it. So if you want to catch tropical species in southern California, great. But if it means the rockfishes aren’t reproducing, not so good. And so we have all of these things on the horizon, a lot of them aren’t really… We can’t measure that they’re doing much damage now. And so back to your point, is this sustainable? Well, we don’t know, but we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future and how that’s going to impact what people are allowed to catch, basically.

Hank Shaw:

Well, that’s great. I want to wrap up with, tell me a rock fishing story and then just a fun story from all the years that you’ve been interacting with rockfish. And then I’ll let you go.

Milton Love:

Fishing, a rock fishing story?

Hank Shaw:

Either a fishing story or some other scientific interaction with actual live rockfish.

Milton Love:

Okay. I’ll tell you about the time I was cheated out of the jackpot, which still bothers me. When I was 16 years old, so what year is that, 1963. So I lived in Santa Monica and there was a sport fishing landing at Paradise Cove, which is just north of Malibu. And they were starting to fish at what’s called Hidden Reef, which is actually a series of very small banks located near Santa Barbara Island. We actually took the sub there a couple of times, really rocky there, gorgeous.

Hank Shaw:

No longer hidden.

Milton Love:

No longer hidden. And they weren’t actually hidden then because they were fishing them. So Jack Ward who owned the landing and eventually owned Cisco’s and Oxnard and made so much money, and I kid you not, he owned a bank. He was very creative in the sport fishing industry, really remarkable. Unfortunately started dicking his girl deckhand, so he wasn’t married after a while, but still, you know, whatever.

Milton Love:

So he was starting to fish at Hidden Reef. And I would religiously read the fish counts in the LA Times, and all of a sudden, Paradise Cove, they were going like, 47 anglers, 112 cow cod. And I’m going like, Como, what’s that about? Oh my God. So a phone call and in fact, an article in the LA Times probably, said on Saturdays and Sundays, Jack Ward’s boat, the Coroloma, is going out. No, it was the Gentlemen at the time, Gentlemen made eight knots. It could barely get… That’s the slowest party boat I have ever been on. And it took three hours to get out to Hidden Reef, but we went out there.

Milton Love:

And so Hidden Reef starts in about 300 feet of water and winds up being in like 600. And so Ward was fishing. Early on, everybody fishes shallow, because it’s easier until they fish it out. So he was fishing like 400, 450 feet of water. And I remember I brought two rods out. One with my Jig Master, my trusty Jig Master filled with a 20 pound monofilament. And so I think I was using like an eight ounce sinker. You could get down. It was great. I caught some fish bank rockfish, no cow cods. I got banks, some bocaccios. But it was good. It was much better than fishing in Santa Monica where that place had been fished since the twenties. And you wound up fishing on year classes of bocaccio. I mean, there was almost nothing else there. So this was like, fabulous. Right?

Milton Love:

And then I hung my gear up and in pulling on the line to free it, the line snapped right at the surface. Oh my God. No more line left on my Jig Master, but I did have, get this, I had a spinning reel, my Langley Spinator that had enough line. So now I’m fishing with like 400 feet down with my Langley Spinator and my spinning rod. Okay. But you got to do what you got to do. So, and I remember I only had a single hook on and I had an anchovy, and by golly, I caught a 16 pound bocaccio. That’s one of the biggest bocaccio I still have ever seen. I mean, I’ve seen them at 20 pounds, but not very commonly. It was a really big bocaccio. And I’m going like, aces.

Milton Love:

So comes the time for the jackpot, so for those of you who are listening, jackpot basically at the time, everybody who wanted to enter this contest, put in a buck. And you put in a buck and the person who has entered the contest who caught the largest fish, and you do it on a balance beam, one fish against another, wins all the money. And there was like, I don’t know, $35 in there, which at the time for me was a humongous amount of money. At the time, a trip on a Santa Monica party boat was $6.50. I was rich. Right?

Milton Love:

So I get the jackpot time, pull out my bocaccio, and it wins. I’m going like, aces, man. I am going to be rich. So on the way in, I’m waiting for the deckhand to give me my money. And we get near the port and I ask the deckhand politely where’s my money. And he said, oh man, I didn’t tell you? Yeah, this guy, his friend put a dollar in for him and didn’t tell him. And so his cow cod was bigger than your bocaccio. And I didn’t have the wit to go like, I was just fucked out of $35. This is like a lie. And this shows you how naive I was. It wasn’t until like 30 years later, probably, I thought back and went, wait a minute.

Milton Love:

And so the only good part of this story is that those people are dead now, all of them. I am 74. Those people I don’t think could have lived to be 87, which is what they are now probably or 90. And so I won. I mean, in a sense, I won. In a sense, I didn’t win. And though to put in perspective, what would have I have done? In those days there was no social media. I could have gone on Bloodydecks and gone like, I was ripped off of my jackpot. I could have gone to what? Could have gone to Jack Ward and skipper and go like, I was ripped off. No way. That was a dog eat dog time. Gone up to the landing, hey, I was ripped off, me, 16-year-old guy was ripped… No, no way. My dad would have had to be like the district attorney of LA for me to have gotten the money. And he wasn’t.

Hank Shaw:

And then it wouldn’t have mattered if it was 35 bucks.

Milton Love:

Yeah. No, exactly. That’s an excellent point. If he had been like the godfather or the mafia of LA, same difference. I could have had him torch the landing, but I wouldn’t have had to. So anyway, that’s a story that, clearly, still eats away at me.

Hank Shaw:

We all have them. We all have them.

Milton Love:

Yeah, good. I’m glad. I hope something eats away with you.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, it does. It does. It involves a gag grouper, some guy’s girlfriend and-

Milton Love:

Really?

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. Okay. So, I’m going out of Wilmington, North Carolina, and we’re doing a blue water bottom fishing trip. And I don’t catch a lot of gag grouper. Gag grouper can get pretty big. And so I’m up near the bow of the boat and there’s this guy and his girlfriend to my right. And everybody’s catching fish, some grunts, some porgies and black sea bass, and I’m fishing a heavy iron on the bottom. I’m kind of like dinking it in and out of the crevices and the holes because I’m looking for grouper.

Hank Shaw:

Sure enough, I hook up and it feels like a snag. And then it shakes his head. And I’m like, oh, here we go. And this is a big fish. And I mean, I’m not ashamed to say I did a little rail reeling on this fish, because it was that big.

Milton Love:

That’s okay.

Hank Shaw:

And so I’m working it up, I’m working it up, and all of a sudden, there’s a crowd. Well, this guy’s girlfriend, who’s right to my right, she catches, I don’t know, a one pound black sea bass. And she’s like, net, net, I need the net. And this black sea bass is swimming around. And I got color. I can see the fish.

Milton Love:

Right. I can see where this is going. Keep going.

Hank Shaw:

And I can see the fish. And oh my God, it’s like a 40 some odd, maybe bigger pound, it’s a big ass gag grouper. And so the deckhand is behind me with the net for my grouper, but the girlfriend and the boyfriend are screaming at him for the net for this one pound black sea bass. And I’m yelling, “Lift the fish. Lift the damn fish. Lift that fish.” And the deckhand’s yelling at her. And she’s not, and there’s this black sea bass swimming around just under the surface, swims a circle around my line.

Milton Love:

Exactly.

Hank Shaw:

Bing. And I see this gag grouper go back to the bottom. And I’m shaking right now, because it was so bad that the deckhand grabbed me by the lapels and looked nose to nose like, let it go, man. Let it go.

Milton Love:

Okay. I have two more stories. So there used to be a TV show, The Danny Thomas Show. And so Danny Thomas was the lead, the actor and comedian. And then in the show, he had a son, and the son was played by Rusty Hamer, and Rusty Hamer was a child actor. And one day out of Santa Monica, we’re fishing rock cod and Rusty Hamer was on the boat. And I always fish the bow. I love fishing the bow rock cod, because there’s almost nobody up there. And you’re on the stern, you got all these people around you, and there’s all these tangles. You can avoid tangles up on the bow. So there was about three of us all about the same age, probably 16, Rusty Hamer, his some sleazy friend of his and me. And Oren Winfield had anchored up on this spot in like 300 feet of water. It’s hard to anchor accurately. And he had anchored in such a way that the bow was sitting over the rock, but the stern wasn’t, so nobody was catching shit back there. And we were just pounding bocaccios, one after another.

Milton Love:

And I caught, and I am sure I caught a really big bocaccio. The other two guys were just throwing their fish on the deck. And I caught one and put it in a bag and Rusty Hamer, after like five minutes, just insisted it was his fish. And we were screaming at each other, and Oren, who is like 70 years old, the skipper, and spent all of his time smoking cigarettes and coughing, he was laughing. And finally, I just felt myself in danger and I gave him the fucking fish. That was awful. But you know what, I was small and wore glasses. And so there was that.

Milton Love:

Damn. I had one other story about… Oh, being in tears. So yellowtail, you know, the jack, extremely rare in the Santa Monica area, particularly in the fifties, water was cold.

Hank Shaw:

Not any more.

Milton Love:

Well, that’s true. So other than during the El Nino year of ’57, ’58 and a little burst of them in ’63, there were just no yellowtail at all. The water was too cold for them. They were all further south or-

Hank Shaw:

A side note, they were catching them in Pacifica two years ago.

Milton Love:

Yes. And in fact, what, they catch white seabass there. They catch them in Santa-

Hank Shaw:

In Bodega.

Milton Love:

Yeah. So, fish have moved north. There’s no question. So, what yellowtail there would be would come up, and I’m not kidding, for like a week, there’d be a little flurry of 10 pound ones in the fall and then they’d retreat. They moved south as the water cooled off. And so there was a little flurry, and I, again, was out on the all-day boat with Oren Winfield, and we were anchored up right just north of Redondo on a little rock pile. And I caught one yellowtail. I got it in the boat. And that was like the second one I ever caught, so that was like a big deal. It turns out actually, I don’t even like to eat yellowtail, but different story.

Milton Love:

So, and then I hooked another one and this is fabulous. And I get up near color and this old man tangles my line and yanks on it, yanks on the line, and pop, there goes the yellowtail. And I was in tears quite honestly. And Oren as usual has no sympathy whatsoever. He always called me love. He goes like, ah, don’t cry, love. Don’t cry. Smoking, coughing, don’t cry, like that. So, there you go. That’s what makes a-

Hank Shaw:

I never cried. I just got mad.

Milton Love:

Well, you’re a better man than I, again.

Hank Shaw:

Well, I’m from Jersey. Right? So I’m going to throw hands with people.

Milton Love:

No, that’s all right. I’m surprised you didn’t punch the young woman out. That would have been-

Hank Shaw:

No, I only punch women who punch me first.

Milton Love:

No, okay. That’s good, a code of honor. That’s excellent.

Hank Shaw:

No, I was getting hot at the boyfriend for just like, just lift the damn fish. And that’s why the… The deckhand could tell that I was just… And he was just grabbing me. He dragged me away and just let it go, man. Just go have a beer, sit down, come back.

Milton Love:

A wise move, that was actually a good move on his part.

Hank Shaw:

It really was. It really was.

Milton Love:

I love that.

Hank Shaw:

And I picked it up, because I’ve had to do the same to a couple of guys when I was a deckhand.

Milton Love:

So, I’ve sucked up all of your time. Thank you for this. This was jolly.

Hank Shaw:

This was awesome. I can’t wait to release this. The season releases starts in Labor Day, and then we’re going to just pump them out one after the other. And we have all kinds of cool topics. So I’ll let you know when it runs.

Milton Love:

Yeah. And if you ever want to… I mean, we can talk about anything you like. We can cover other fish or I don’t know, whatever you want to talk about. Like I say, I have no life. I’m just sitting here drinking tea. And if you’re ever down here, there’s places to buy hard cider. We can drink beer or whatever.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. And then we should go rock fishing.

Milton Love:

Oh man. I’ve been rock fishing one time in about 10 years, the only rock cod fishing I do now is for science. So there’s a guy who does genetics of rockfish, Peter Sudmant, who’s UC Berkeley. He’s like a stud in genetics. His PhD was on Neanderthal DNA. And he emailed me about four years ago and said, oh, I just got here, a new professor, want to work on rockfish genetics. And so we’ve been collaborating, catching fish for him, basically. So it was a good excuse to go out and kill fish, basically to get the genetic material for him. He just is about to publish a paper, looking at comparing rockfish that have a lifespan of 200 years with rockfish that have a lifespan of 15 years. Can you actually see different genes that coincide with longevity? So that was pretty cool stuff.

Hank Shaw:

That’ll make the news.

Milton Love:

That’ll make the news, yeah, yeah.

Hank Shaw:

Well, cool. So, if people wanted to get in touch with you, how would somebody do that?

Milton Love:

You can email me, love@lifesci.ucsb.edu.

Hank Shaw:

Those are the gauchos, aren’t they?

Milton Love:

Yes, we are the gauchos. I forget that for years at a time. So if you type in Milton Love UCSB, you’ll probably see my email address. I have a website with all kinds of humorous shit that I’ve written and I don’t know, stuff.

Hank Shaw:

I’ll put the links of the books on there too.

Milton Love:

Yeah, if you could, and then if you could it’d be great if you link to the books, and people can call me. I don’t care. Like I say, it’s all good. Let’s see, what number? 805-893-2935. I’m only in the lab a couple of times a week, but I do have a machine. And people send me photographs of fish, not daily, but certainly weekly. What is this? One of the favorite things these days, I don’t know why, is people are catching odd colored rockfish. And the typical aberrant coloration is a black rockfish that has big orange blotches on it or the fins are orange or things like that, that kind of orange morph or a bocaccio with big black blotches.

Hank Shaw:

Oh yeah, I’ve caught many of those.

Milton Love:

Right and in fact, that’s the most common unusual color variation. And that’s actually a skin cancer.

Hank Shaw:

I thought it was because the devil tried to catch them and they couldn’t quite get it.

Milton Love:

Well, that’s what skin cancer is even in humans, the devil tries to get you and you get away and it turns you… No. So it gives you melanoma. Melanoma is actually getting away from the devil. So bocaccio, other rockfish will get this, this skin cancer that turns their skin black, but not in the quantity that bocaccio do. In fact, it’s not a hundred percent, but almost every big bocaccio will have some black, and in a lot of cases, it’s like big tar patches. I’ve seen one cow cod, it actually had a little patch across its lip. It looked like Hitler, like a little mustache.

Hank Shaw:

Oh my God, like cow Hitler.

Milton Love:

Cow Hitler. And so then you may have seen this. Yellowtail rockfish are susceptible to little patches of like orange or yellow. Again, that’s a skin cancer. It probably doesn’t kill the fish, but it does alter the pigment cells that are on the skin. So, people send me those kinds of photographs all the time. And I love to see photographs. It doesn’t have to be rockfish. It can be anything. I’ve actually written papers. People will send me a photograph, particularly from southern California. Look, I caught this and it’ll turn out to be the first time that a species has been documented from California. And so I’ll write a paper about it. I’ll throw the person’s name on the paper, and it’ll be like the first description of whatever, a cardinalfish of this kind from California or whatever.

Hank Shaw:

That’s cool.

Milton Love:

So I’m always looking for that kind of thing.

Hank Shaw:

Well, excellent. I will post all that stuff in the show notes. And this has been fantastic. And I’ll let you know what it runs.

Milton Love:

All right. Thank you, kiddo.

Hank Shaw:

Thanks a lot.

Milton Love:

All right. See ya.

Hank Shaw:

I got to say that was one of the most enjoyable podcasts I have ever done in the four years that I’ve been doing this podcast. So I hope you liked it as well. Thanks again for listening. I am Hank Shaw, and this is the Hunt Gather Talk podcast brought to you by Filson and E-Fish. As always, you can follow me on social media, on Instagram, where I am most active. I am @huntgathercook. I also run the Hunt Gather Cook Facebook group. You have to answer some questions to get into the group, just tell me that you heard me on my podcast and I will let you in. And the core of what I do is my website, which is Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, and you can get to that at Huntgathercook.com. Talk to you next week. Tight lines and good times. Take it easy.