This picture was taken in Ras Mohammed national park in Egypt in 2012 on the second dive of the day after I had dived among clouds of Anthias.
The gargantuan fish you can see in the title image is called a Napoleon Wrasse. If you look at the size of my dive buddy you could be forgiven for thinking that they were 4-5 meters distant from the fish.
This is simply not the case, these fish are often as big as a human and seem quite intimidating when they first approach you, however, they are gentle and inquisitive in nature. In that picture, my dive buddy (seen in the background) was no more than a metre away from the Napoleon Wrasse.
During this dive, this large Napoleon Wrasse kept brushing up against me very playfully, and I was convinced that it basically thought us scuba divers some type of alien fish species to either befriend or gently encourage us to leave its territory.
Whatever the case may be, it was extremely slow, gentle and methodical in the way it physically interacted with me. All of the scuba divers who were on that dive joked afterwards that I had been the object of a fishy courtship 😂
Regardless of my experience diving with this amazing gentle giant, I found this question on the front page of Google, and I have to say it makes me a little queasy just considering the attitude humankind has toward wildlife.
Can you eat Napoleon Wrasse?
Traditionally, banquet fish like the Napoleon wrasse are held in restaurant aquariums before they become a meal. Despite the Napoleon wrasse's endangered status, some Hong Kong establishments regularly stock the fish.
Source
My anger about so-called delicacies like the Napoleon wrasse being served at banquets does not stem from an abhorrence of eating fish. I am a pescatarian myself, and part of why I feel fine with eating fish is the many interactions, attachments and understandings I have built up for these animals.
With that understanding comes respect, something various native peoples around the world have understood for millennia in venerating the animals they subsisted upon.
What sickens me about the Napoleon wrasse served as a delicacy at a banquet, or shark fin soup for that matter is that these are endangered species. Many native cultures understood the importance of not depleting that which sustains you, which is evident in both their practices and veneration of various animal species.
I have heard the argument put forth, that this is just a cultural bias, and that people like me don't understand how important this is to a certain culture.
My answer is simple... any creature considered a delicacy is killed and served up as a status symbol!
It has nothing to do with culture.
I feel exactly the same way about members of the aristocracy in my country who engage in Trophy Hunting.
It has everything to do with status, class, money and arrogance!
Cultures as a whole can and do change, this has been shown time and time again throughout history. Cultures adapt to changing resources, to war, to all kinds of variables.
But human arrogance needs to be highlighted until those people are shamed by everyone around them into doing the right thing, rather than the thing that makes them feel like some type of 'special' or 'superior' person.
That's it... rant over 🐟😉
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