MilkfishesChanidae

People have farmed this fish for something like five hundred years, and for most of that time nobody could get it to breed.

Milkfish is one of the great food fishes of Asia, the national fish of the 🇵🇭 Philippines and a staple across 🇮🇩 Indonesia, raised in brackish coastal ponds since at least the fifteenth century. It was chosen because it eats nothing anybody has to buy. A milkfish grazes the mat of algae, cyanobacteria and detritus that grows on the floor of a warm shallow pond, so a pond of green scum turns into fish without a sack of feed being opened. It also tolerates water that would kill almost anything else worth farming: fresh, full-strength seawater, and saltier than the sea.

The bottleneck was the start of the cycle. Milkfish spawn offshore and would not do it in a pond, so the entire industry ran on wild young. Fry gatherers worked the shoreline with fine nets on the right tide, and the catch was counted out by hand, one transparent fish the length of a fingernail at a time, and sold on to the pond owners. That was how it worked for centuries. Captive milkfish were finally spawned in the 1970s, after adults had been held for years in floating cages, and hatcheries took over most of the supply from there.

None of which is what you meet here. In this sea the milkfish is a wild animal in shallow open water over sand and reef flats, uncommon, fast and giving no sign of any of the above. Its family tree is the better story: it looks like a tuna or a jack and is close to neither. Outside its own small order, the nearest living relatives of the milkfish are the carps and the catfishes.