explains Professor Ilia Joldasova, a fish biologist with the Uzbek-

istan Academy of Sciences. “A lot of people came to the Aral to

fish and hunt. It was a tourist mecca. It was a thriving area—an

oasis in the middle of the desert.” What was remarkable about the

Aral, she says, was not its biodiversity, but the productivity of the

ecosystem, particularly along the south shore. “The southern bays

were like a kindergarten for fish,” she says. “In the spring, the bays

held so many spawning fish that the water looked like it was

boiling.”

It’s no surprise then that the fishing village of Muynak, also lo-

cated on the sea’s southern shore, was a thriving hub of commercial

activity. All hours of the day and night, fishermen crowded the

local wharves, transporting their catch to the Muynak cannery—

one of the Soviet Union’s largest. Uzabkay Irmuhanov, fifty-three,

first started working at the cannery in the 1960s. Eventually he

worked his way up to become chief mechanic at the facility, which

once employed fifteen hundred people on three shifts, churning out

sixteen million cans of fish per year. What didn’t go into the cans

was used for cattle and chicken feed. But as the sea shrank, Mr. Ir-

muhanov says, the output at the plant dropped at first to twelve

million cans, and then six million cans. In order to keep the plant

from closing, Soviet officials shipped in fish from as far away as the

Baltic Sea and the Pacific Ocean to be processed here. But that

proved to be unsustainable, and activity at the plant dwindled from

three shifts down to one, and then none. “Officially it’s not closed,”

he says with a straight face, gesturing to the plant over his shoulder.

Great pains have been taken to mothball the cannery in a way that

would allow Mr. Irmuhanov and his colleagues to restart the assem-

bly line at a moment’s notice. “If we got some fish, we could be pro-

cessing again.”

Kirbay Utaganov knows a thing or two about fish. An affable,

friendly man with a deeply creased face that smiles easily behind

thick glasses, Mr. Utaganov, seventy-five, spent decades working as

a set-net fisherman on the Aral Sea. In his latter years he oversaw a

crew of six as the captain of a boat called 854 Muynak. When the

Aral’s waters began to recede he and his fellow fishermen became

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