He was right: unless you are an ocean fisherman, a seafood wholesaler or another bluefin, you won't often encounter something so rare and beautiful before it is disassembled.
Across the oceans, fishermen are caught up in a "race to fish" their quotas, a race that has had tragic, and environmentally disastrous, consequences over many decades.
Protecting oceans and fishermen go hand in hand, something Sea to Table has seen from partnering with small-scale sustainable fisheries in the United States.
Each 750-pound triptych depicts vivid scenes of the ocean, hula dancers, fishermen or rowers and was later cast in FiberStone, a lightweight material by Stone Yard in San Diego.
But as acidifying waters alter the chemistry of the world's oceans, scientists and fishermen are just beginning to understand how this economically, culturally, and ecologically important species will be impacted.
Given that more than half of the world's population lives within 200 kilometers (150 miles) of a coast, and more than a billion people worldwide, particularly in developing countries, depend on oceans -- and fishermen -- for their primary sources of protein, it is critical for these small-scale fisheries to be sustainable.
Still, Shannon sees a respect for ocean life in the fishermen's efforts to engage, face to face, with an animal that, thanks in large part to Hollywood, we most often envision as a shadowy, invisible threat.
Unregulated overfishing by foreign fleets provoked a rash of Somali pirate attacks in the Indian Ocean a decade ago, when local fishermen who were being driven to financial ruin took up arms to defend territorial waters against intruders.
So the momometer tells us of another huge news story: bluefin tuna have carried radiation leaked from Japan's tsunami-damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant across the ocean to California, where fishermen are catching them.
Poachers would set off explosives and kill steelhead by the dozens, fish that had made it upriver from the ocean — past sea lions, fishermen and a dam — but hadn't yet reached their spawning grounds.
