9 Attack of the Italian Zander

Putting Back More Than We Take Out

The zander, or pike perch, is a Eurasian cousin of the walleye that’s been getting some negative publicity as being hostile to humans. There are numerous online videos of this fish allegedly attacking divers, but the most infamous incident harks back to 2009 when world headlines screamed versions of “Monster Fish Killed After Terrorising Swiss Swimmers.” Reportedly, an eighteen-pound Sander lucioperca had gone amok in Switzerland’s Lac Majeur. According to the United Kingdom’s Telegraph, “Two swimmers were treated in hospital for bite wounds up to four inches long after being attacked at the lake, which borders Italy. . . . Police divers at first tried to capture the carnivorous fish with a net, but when this failed, they pursued the zander with a harpoon and managed to kill it.” The offending fish, which was suspected of “suffering from a hormonal imbalance,” was then served up for dinner to placate tourists.1

This was an unusual event considering that zander are not known for fish-on-human violence. If anything, their reputation is that of a popular game fish prized for their delicate taste and flaky white flesh. As a food fish, they’re farmed in aquaculture facilities like the AquaPri pike perch plant in Denmark. Perhaps that’s where the Chippewa casino in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, got its controversial zander fillets that it tried to pass off as walleye. Or even more ironic was the “Walleyegate” scandal of 2004 in which pike perch was substituted for walleye in some Twin Cities restaurants.

The reason I write “ironic” is because walleye is the official Minnesota state fish, and with Minneapolis being my home town, and me being an obsessive fisherman, you’d think I’d have more of a relationship with “walleyed pike.” But I never caught very much of that fish or even had much of an awareness of it. For me, they were always a bycatch, so it’s ironic to me that a half-century-old Minnesota fisherman would take an interest in the Percidae family. Especially after moving to Arkansas, which for decades boasted a world record, nonnative twenty-two-pounder.

Zander don’t get much bigger than that. Under unusual conditions, they’re supposedly capable of reaching four feet.2 The current IGFA world record is a twenty-five-pounder from Switzerland. Pictured here is a monster-sized zander in that same weight class caught in Italy by Dino Ferrari, the “bro” who caught that wels catfish that weighed almost three hundred pounds. The weight of his zander, however, went unrecorded.

Hence, with the knowledge that there are monster zanders out there, and with accusations of thug behavior, this was a species I had to investigate as a potential monster fish. And since I was in Florence on a research-based leave of absence, and since I had the opportunity to do some fact-finding in Italy, I took it.

On my way to meet fishing guide Oliver Howard for some zandering, I had time to sit down in a park and break out my notebook. It was time to have that serious conversation with myself about how I could put back more than I take out, and I was dreading the confrontation. Because what if I couldn’t live up to the challenge I had issued to others and myself? Or what if I was on the wrong track? Like maybe I should be thinking more about tackle or tactics rather than focusing on my own eco-centric indulgences. Whatever the case, I started jotting:

1. Teach more environmental courses because that’s the most important thing I do on this planet
2. Shoot to publish eco-essays in magazines and journals that communicate with a wider audience

3. Ask myself this question every year (how to put back more?)

4. Take kids fishing

5. Ask others this question every year (how to put back more?)

6. Do more community water quality work, which I’ve been slacking on

7. Take a bag to pick up litter whenever I go hiking

8. Put litter in my boat when I go fishing

9. Take adults fishing

10. Don’t look for a silver bullet, but look instead for myriad ways to help an ecosystem out

11. Look for myriad ecosystems to help out

12. Consider running for public office on the Green Party ticket—not now, but after retirement

13. Actually research what I can do for the environment

14. Volunteer for environmentally related activities (brainstorm more on this later)

15. Live healthier so as to live longer so as to give back more

16. Consider running for public office as a Democrat (or as a Republican??)

17. Write annual letters to the editor regarding environmental concerns

18. Buy land to protect (make sure there’s good fishing there)

19. Revise #3; make this list an ongoing project and add to it whenever a thought hits me

20. Revise #5; ask others this question more frequently than annually—not just to get more ideas for myself, but to get others thinking about this too

Voila! I suddenly had twenty ideas in twenty minutes, and starting the dialogue wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

The fishing, on the other hand, would prove to be more challenging.

I met Ollie on the Ponte alle Grazie. His guide service, Fishing in Florence, specialized in connecting clients with siluro (wels catfish), carp, and other species in the Arno River. I’d met Ollie the other day for a strategizing beer and liked him right off the bat. A young Brit who’d graduated from Oxford University, he was a fellow English major who had decided to concentrate on his passion for birds and fish. In the process, he’d done some conservation work setting up nesting boxes throughout Florence and had written a book about birds in the region. He’d also established himself as an extremely successful and ambitious guide. What I really appreciated, though, was the way he looked at the river as an artery rich in biodiversity cutting through the middle of the city.

Anyway, we were shooting to fish for zander at night, and since it was only two in the afternoon, we had a few hours before sunset. So we went downstream to a pool where a 260-pound siluro was trapped, and he rigged me up with a heavy-duty casting rod and some modified Rapala lures. I put on a pair of waders, Ollie instructed me on the proper depth and speed for the lure, and I got out in the water.

It was an impressive spot and cool to know that just upstream Michelangelo’s David continued to endure as a mind-blowing masterpiece. Botticelli’s overrated Birth of Venus was there as well, in the company of some extremely expressive Leonardos in the Uffizi, all within spitting distance of the Baroquely ornate yet Gothic Duomo, which is symbolic of this cultural center for art and aesthetics in Italy.

“Aesthetics,” of course, meaning what people look for in beauty, a word I explain to my poetry students as something that has different connotations for different individuals. The example I always provide is that of a big old ugly catfish, which might not look beautiful to them, but when I see one, I see an epitome of beauty. Which is why I was fishing on the Arno right now.

Meanwhile, Ollie had set up a lighter-weight rod and was searching the shores for signs of zander. But something wasn’t right about the water. The color was off due to a recent rain. The river was also running a bit fast and high.

Then, when the sun went down, Ollie told me he wasn’t feeling very optimistic about getting zander. He recommended going out for a beer and trying at a later date, which sounded good to me.

So that’s what we did, followed by another beer. We talked about fish, showed each other some cell phone photos, and discussed some human beings as well. I was sincerely interested in his work, and the feeling was mutual. By the time we said “ciao,” we had made a connection, and I was looking forward to going out again when the conditions were more optimal.

I met my next guide, Fabrizio Terenghi, in the city of Como in northern Italy, just south of the Swiss border. He picked me up at the Best Western Continental, and by 5:45 p.m. we were in the city center on Lake Como, surrounded by towering monuments and griffins carved in stone. It was dark out, and foggy clouds were concealing the dramatic mountains descending almost vertically into the lake, but I could feel them all around us. I could also feel the steady drizzle.

Fabrizio handed me a superlight spinning rod with a gunmetal-gray rubber jig on it and took a heavier rod with a crankbait for himself. We went to the concrete wall and started casting. Nothing. Nothing but the awesome mountains I couldn’t see with homes lit up like Christmas trees, including George Clooney’s mansion.

After a bit, we moved to a spot along a manicured parkway that could’ve been in Paris or Vienna or New York City. There was a sand beach beneath the wall we were casting from, and an injured mallard was getting battered by the waves. I don’t know what his deal was, but I couldn’t help not being concerned.

A half hour later, we moved on to the harbor. We were on a walkway cutting across the cove and there were dog walkers and lovers strolling arm in arm. It started raining a bit harder, and I felt my fingers getting numb. Nevertheless, I kept up a steady rhythm of casting, letting the jig sink to the bottom, giving it a couple cranks, then letting it sink again to simulate an injured minnow.

Then one hit, just like that, and I reeled in my target fish. It was a little zander, just ten inches long, torpedo-shaped and healthy. It looked like a whittled-down walleye built for speed. Wow! I’d gotten what I’d come to get.

“You got the little one,” Fabrizio said as I tossed it back. “Next you will get the medium one.”

I kept on casting in the same spot. There was a lot of activity there with fish breaking the surface alongside the boats. Fabrizio suspected they were perch. I figured something was either feeding there or forcing up smaller fish. I also figured that zander must have excellent vision to be feeding at night.

Then, wham! I got another, and this one was bigger. It started giving my lightweight rod the business, but I brought it in, white belly gleaming in the rain. It was the medium-sized zander Fabrizio had predicted, and since it was too heavy to reel in, he lifted it in by the line and laid it down on the planks, a sturdy sixteen-incher somewhere between two and three pounds. Victory again!

I could see the pikey quality of this species even more than in the fish before. This pike perch was way more missile-like than a walleye in both shape and attitude. It seemed to me that with their fancy, fanning dorsal fins, walleye are more elegant, and that the zander model is stealthier. Whatever the case, it was a badass-looking fish.

Both of us kept casting. I was really feeling it, and after a bit, I brought in another fish. This one was a cavedano, or European chub, probably pushing five pounds. Fabrizio was amazed by its size. Like the other fish, we let it go.

Then I got another fish.

“You are magic, my friend,” Fabrizio said, trying to unsnag his line. He’d lost a few lures and had been tangled up a few times, but since I was getting the fish, it was a successful night for both of us.

This one was a “real perch,” as Fabrizio called it. It looked like a yellow perch but was gray in coloration.

“Bye bye, guy,” I told it, and let it go.

It wasn’t even nine o’clock, and we still had two hours to go, but I was satisfied enough to pack up early. I was hankering for a beer and hungry for dinner, and besides, I was wet to the shivering point. But most of all, since I’d caught what I’d come to get, this meant that we could concentrate on a different monster fish in the morning, one that was a longtime favorite for both of us: pike!

We arrived at Lago di Pusiano on the outskirts of Como at seven in the morning. Cicco (pronounced “Cheecho”) was readying the boat, which was powered by an electric trolling motor because no gas motors were allowed on the lake except for law enforcement. Fabrizio had referred to Cicco as “The Zander Master” and had told me about the twenty-two-pounder he’d caught, which was the second-largest known zander ever caught in Italy.

Out on the lake, the fog was just beginning to lift. There was a fish called scardola breaking the surface everywhere, and two huge swans immediately came over majestically begging for some bread. But there were also plenty of diving birds, ducks, gulls, mud hens, crows, and herons in the area.

As the fog began to lift off the lake, I saw that we were once again in a dramatic alpine basin. Mountains rose insanely steeply all around us in the burnt umber of fall turning gold. There was an ambery luminescence to everything that was casting the greenery in a vibrant apricot light. Idyllic rooftops and steeples were poking up from the lush as they have for centuries.

Fabrizio rigged me up with an eight-inch chubster of a white rubber worm that swam like a fish, and my guides began alternating between similar lures and some smaller jigs that looked like frizzy pink tutus. We fished some brush piles, got no action whatsoever, then went out to an island owned by an eccentric banker. We saw three wallabies roaming free, and there were African storks and obsidian peacocks strutting the shoreline. We fished there for an hour, but again, nothing.

That’s when Cicco decided to make things happen, or so he joked as he took a leak into a plastic container then dumped the contents overboard. “You’ll see,” he told us in Italian.

We moved over to some tall, wickery grass, worked the shore for ten minutes, and then something hit my line. It was a blazing green and yellow bass that dropped jaws as we netted it: a four-pound largemouth that they couldn’t stop whistling at. Apparently, they don’t get much larger than that in these here parts.

What I wanted, though, was a mongo pike, so we got back to casting, Cicco claiming that his “magic pee” had attracted the bass. We laughed at that, and I made a joke about how I should bottle some and take some back to the United States, to which Fabrizio replied that I might have some trouble at the airport.

That’s when a monster pike appeared. It followed Cicco’s lure in, and we saw it hovering thick and green right beneath us, almost a meter long, before sinking into the algae-colored depths.

“Drop, drop!” Fabrizio exclaimed, motioning for me to open my bale so my lure could follow it down. We all did that, jigging and casting in the vicinity, but the fish was clearly spooked.

The morning went on, sometimes raining lightly, sometimes not. It was pretty cold and damp, but we all had rain jackets and warm clothes. Then Fabrizio’s pole bent into an arc.

Knees bent to absorb the shock (a technique I’d never seen before), he eventually horsed it over to the boat. It was a solid pike. In fact, it was the same pike we’d seen before. Both Fabrizio and Cicco recognized it, and after a lot of resistance they finally got it into the net.

We were now totally stoked, slapping palms and taking pictures. The beast must’ve weighed fifteen pounds. It was greenish blue and covered with a white ovally pattern on the sides with bubbles of froth all over it. Like the bass, it was catch and release.

Again, Fabrizio and I bowed down to Cicco’s magic pee, which he claimed had a duration of three to four hours. Cicco then made a joke having to do with what the results would be if he were to upgrade his contribution to the lake—a suggestion Fabrizio emphatically discouraged.

It was time for lunch, so we pulled up to the municipal dock. There was a five-foot-long dead siluro on the shore with a patch of flesh nibbled off its tail by some small animal. There was also a live siluro of the same size strung to the dock. I went over and checked it out. It had that black-and-gold speckilization I’d seen on a wels I’d caught in Spain, and it splashed all over when I hefted it up to snap a few pictures. Must’ve weighed eighty pounds.

Fabrizio talked to the fishery guys and purchased my license, then told me they were keeping those cats for a scientist who was coming to take some tissue samples. I didn’t get much more info than that, but if they were testing fish for anything, that’s progressive. Just like the city’s solar-powered sight-seeing boat anchored near the dock.

Reflecting on this, I couldn’t help adding “Go solar” to my list of what I could give back. Going solar, however, is a lot easier to think about than do, and it can be expensive in the short term. But it’s something to think about, especially if you can pay it forward to the grid. That’s what we need to be moving toward, the idea of every building being its own power source.

Anyhow, we warmed up, ate some paninis, then got back out there. It was still raining on and off, and the windchill was pretty harsh, but we continued to tough it out. After another hour, Fabrizio added his own magic pee to the lake, and then I made a donation of my own.

Minutes later, Cicco the Zander Master hooked up with a fish. He brought it in from the stern, and its massive gray tones and flaring gills gave it away. It was a monster zander, well over two feet long. I netted it, and again there was jubilation.

My magic pee was credited for attracting this fish as we shot some pictures, then let it go. All of us had now caught a good fish, and because these were basically the fish I’d grown up with, the whole experience was rewarding in a nostalgic way. Still, I was longing for my own pike, which would really make for a feeling of completion.

When it hit an hour later, I thought it was a tree stump. I yanked back, and it didn’t budge. Fabrizio advised me to ease it up. I did, and it was like hoisting a waterlogged limb from the muck. Then I felt that familiar shimmy of a muscly fish powering down. It gave a nice run, taking out ten yards of line. Then I brought it back again. It went right into the net, and suddenly I had my pike. It was probably a dozen pounds.

This was one of those fishing trips when everything had gone according to plan. That is, we all got the fish we wanted, and we were all charged with the type of exhilarating exhaustion an angler fishes all day to get. The next stop, therefore, would be the bar.

Later, looking at Cicco’s zander on my phone, the thing that struck me the most was the teeth. They were right there at the end of its dagger-toothed head on its steely, streamlined body: four sharp-as-hell, flesh-rending superfangs, two pointing up, two pointing down. Not only that, they were curving backward to prevent prey from slipping away. They were wicked-looking teeth, lethal-looking teeth, teeth that made the zander vicious in appearance. Man, those teeth were the teeth of nightmares. And because they were designed for snapping down and hanging on, they instantly explained to me why those Swiss swimmers had been “terrorised.”

Not only that, but zander teeth have an actual history of inflicting harm on actual humans, which has resulted in stitches for an actual reason—one that sent me straight to YouTube to further research zander attacks. The foremost video was titled “Aggressive Zander Attacks Divers.”3 Still, it only nipped a single diver, and that’s after he provoked it. As any viewer can see, that zander is already suffering from an injury above its eye. There’s a loose flap of skin there, most likely due to the fighting that comes with competition for spawning. That zander was standing its ground, refusing to leave, so there was definitely something altruistic keeping it there.

Let’s not beat around the bush anymore. The “actual reason” I mention above is obvious, which is why I can’t help agreeing with the responses posted in the comments section following that video. Big Dog writes, “The title is wrong . . . the Zander is not aggressive. . . . More like annoyed Zander defends against annoying divers.” HoppyFishPerse001 echoes this sentiment with, “You guys should respect him [rather] than harassing. Zander has risen his fins to warn you guys but he knows he cant do much. Kinda feel bad for the fish.” GPC adds, “Two bullies harassing a Sander lucioperca that is protecting his eggs.” Ed Dost then puts it all in perspective as a “zander protecting its offspring, should have left it alone.”

As another YouTube video, “Zander on the Nest Attacks Three Times,” demonstrates, this species doesn’t differentiate between humans and inanimate objects; they’re just programmed to try to scare off any threat to their DNA. In this video, a zander bites an irritating rubber lure that it’s clearly not interested in eating because it spits it out thrice—as would any fish guarding its young.4 Just like the zander in “Klopeiner See Zander Attacks Diver,” and all the other videos of zander harassment I could find.5

That’s what happened in Switzerland when that zander was hunted and harpooned to death for the most parental of actions any species could ever take next to procreation. It’s the same story as that demonized wels in Berlin’s Lake Waidsee, or any sunfish that ever nipped any bather on any gravel bar in the summer. It’s just ridiculous to persecute any creature for guarding its young—as if we have more right to be in its environment than it does. I mean, get real, people! Do fish come to your home and menace your kids, antagonize you, then serve you up for dinner?

Hell no! But clearly, media outlets like the Telegraph implicate fish as “hormonally imbalanced” to reframe natural behaviors as crimes against humanity. But I wouldn’t call that “monstrous;” I’d just call it misleading, as well as indicative of an adolescent mentality that’s swift to accuse women of behaving emotionally due to egg generation.

Which leads to another thing the Telegraph got wrong: in the case of zander, the nests are guarded by the males.

Back in Florence a few days later I found myself with Ollie on the Arno, zandering again. I also found the narrative taking an unexpected turn. Rather than conveniently winding up by focusing on my target fish, I’d returned to the question of how to put back.

Both the water and air were damn cold, and I wasn’t feeling very hopeful of catching anything that morning. Casting a floating Rapala, I’d come to the point where I knew I was a hypocrite. Not in what I say or write, but in how I live. Whereas Lea and I were spending the semester together, we usually don’t get that luxury. When we’re in the states, we fly across the country every few weeks, leaving vapor trails that translate to at least 2,200 round-trip miles every time we visit each other. That’s why I went to carbonfootprint.com to estimate how much CO₂ I purchase and pump into the atmosphere every time I make that trip.6 It came out to be .29 metric tons, which is 639 pounds of planet-warming molecules floating around in the sky thanks to me. But that’s not the price I pay for love; that’s the price the environment pays.

I could go in several directions from here. I could try to justify my actions as an eco-writer who pollutes, or I could make a case for being a victim of a system that doesn’t give us much choice. The fact of the matter, though, is that a gallon of gas weighs 6.18 pounds, and according to the U.S. Energy Administration, when we burn a gallon of that heroin it puts an average of 19.6 pounds of carbon dioxide into the sky.7 Diesel adds a couple pounds more, and biodiesel is a couple pounds less, but what I don’t understand is how it’s possible for something to increase three times in mass.

So I sent an email to my buddy Turkey Buzzard. He’s a chemistry professor, and he performed some calculations that came up with a similar figure. He replied that “in extracting fossil fuel, then refining it, then burning it, we’re definitely changing the chemistry of the air, and that is the key issue.”8

In the meantime, our freedom to pollute is lending to a sea level rise of “between 7 and 23 inches . . . by century’s end.” That stat comes from National Geographic News, who estimate that a million species will be extinct in three decades.9

My fingers were now numb from exposure, but I kept on casting anyway and thinking more bummer thoughts. Like how my demand for what I want supplied in my life is destroying what I love the most: the space this planet provides for us to live and die with animals, including each other. Because here I am, adding to that annihilation—which is what makes this question so personally urgent for me. Because if you know you’re responsible, and if you don’t try to reverse the damage you’ve done, then you’re just as much part of the problem as those who actively seek to profit off ignorance.

If anything, that’s the monster we’re facing now. It took billions of years to get to this flash of livable oxygen levels that are only sustainable for an instant in which a delicate balance of acids and carbon and water and heat is being taken for granted. An instant in which I don’t see any god with any magic wand or will to quick-fix what we have irreversibly shot to hell. And even if we could convert to “cleaner fuels” right now and increase education yesterday, we’d only be sustaining a planet on life support. That’s just a fact, and our fisheries are the measure of that. They measure the health of our water, our air, our entire biosphere. Time has run out. There is no magic pee.

Dwelling on such dark thoughts, this would’ve been a good time to have hooked a zander. But that just wasn’t in the cards. Sometimes you catch ’em, sometimes you don’t, and sometimes celebrating a victory just isn’t appropriate considering what’s at stake.

So when the end of the day came around, and I still hadn’t caught a zander, I wasn’t disappointed. Because really, I’d already gotten what I needed, including a sobering dose of owning my own guilt. But what can you do with that?

Winter had set in.

Then it got even colder. Especially on that gray rainy day when the Divided States of America (with a little help from Russia) elected a climate change denier for president who the Center for Biodiversity has characterized as an “unprecedented threat to our nation’s democracy, health, wildlife and environment,” and who threatens “to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, gut the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act . . . [and] eliminate regulations protecting poor communities from pollution.”10 That’s when I, like millions of others, found myself in tears for what I feared would happen to your world and my world and our world as we know it. That’s when I had to be completely honest with myself and actually accept my guilt rather than just feel it. And that’s when I didn’t just think it—I knew it for sure: we all take out more than we can possibly put back. That’s just the way it is.

Thus, to ward off the toxic cloud rolling over everything, I had to answer my own pressing question of how to give back more than I take out. Otherwise, I’d just keep blithering like a powerless little weakling. So to placate myself and nobody else, this is what I came up with.

Back when I was a graduate student at the University of Colorado, a professor gave me some game-changing advice. I was young and idealistic and excited by studying creative writing and imagining where it would lead. That professor was the poet Lorna Dee Cervantes, and the class was eco-poetics, a subject that inspired me to write like a maniac whose motto was “quantity over quality.” That’s how I trained myself to pump it out every day. Nobody needed to tell me to take notes or do my research. Nobody had to assign me a minimum page count. I was on fire. I was a machine. And when I went to conference with Lorna, I was surprised to hear her tell me, “Whatever you’re doing, it’s working, so just keep doing it.”

One question Lorna put to students in that class was the question of “What’s important?” I won’t even get into how that question affected us, but I can say that in considering it, divorces happened, some dropped out, some came out, and others went absolutely looney tunes. But this question made us realize what we needed to fight for and how we needed to do it. Still, a quarter century later, it’s a question I ask myself every single day.

What I realize now is that if we want to give back as much as we can for what’s most important, then we can’t settle for a single definitive answer when we need to operate on multiple fronts. Essentially, we are like sharks that rely on ram ventilation for filtering oxygen. If they stop moving, they drown. Likewise, if we stop trying to answer our most important questions, we fail to grow as a species.

In other words, the question of giving back has become my elusive stingray. And that’s what it needs to be, always out there swimming around, leading me to other fish.

And that’s my panacea as well: don’t answer the damn question; just keep on asking it and doing as much as I can in ways that have proven effective in the past. Meaning doing this! Exactly this! For what’s important! Because this is the most I can do.

That’s what I caught from going after zander, and it’s good enough for me.

And because of that, the question then reverses itself.

It looks you in the eye. It asks you what your own answer is.

And then, just to be an ass, it asks you if your answer is good enough for you.