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Grey seals, minke whales and bluefin tuna: is the North Sea bouncing back to its glory days? (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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From the outside, the Tunny Club looks like any other seaside fish and chip shop. A short walk from Scarborough harbour, only the photos of John Wayne and Errol Flynn on the wall betray the shop’s fleeting history as a global centre for big-game fishing.

In the 1930s, film stars and the ultra-wealthy flocked to the Yorkshire seaside resort for their chance to catch the enormous bluefin tuna – known as “tunny” – lurking off the North Sea coast. In 1933, aristocrat Lorenzo Mitchell-Henry reeled in what remains the largest fish ever caught in British waters: a 386kg bluefin tuna.

Steam-powered yachts filled the bay on the hunt for even larger fish. “The bluefin tuna were coming into the North Sea to feast on the enormous shoals of herring and mackerel that were there. They would be followed by whales and dolphins,” says Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England. By the 1950s, however, the warm-blooded aquatic torpedoes had mostly disappeared, exposing a greater decline in the health of the North Sea ecosystem.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (4 children)

This is totally off topic, but does the guardian use kg because they’re relatively international or do non-human things generally use kg in the UK? I know it’s a mix with the more familiar things (a person’s height or the length of a road vs the height of a new building, for example) being imperial. I just would have expected an animal’s height/weight to be measured the same way a human’s is.

I’ve never heard a British person talk about their own weight in kg (or their own mass), it’s always pounds or stone and pounds. That could just be because I’m American and they’re really thoughtful about my units, but multiplying/dividing precisely by 14 in my head to figure out stone always takes me a moment, so I don’t think it’s that, lol.

It could also just be that I’m old enough that my peers had already finished primary school by the time the switchover was “complete.” Is it an age marker like cursive is in the US or the spelling reform is in Germany?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

We tend to use stones and pounds for measuring personal weight in the UK, although that's gradually moving to kg. Most other things are weighed in kg, products are all in kg - e.g. 1kg flour, 500g pasta.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

In most official settings height and weight are measured in metric.

Imperial sort of sticks around culturally because people's measurements are meaningless unless they're relative and you pick that frame of reference up from your family. Nobody can imagine what a 100kg man looks like, but they can imagine a 16 stone man.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Imperial for humans and cars, metric for everything else.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

UK uses kg for most things.