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In the world of competitive sportfishing, the name Arostegui is royalty. Martini Arostegui has held more than 200 fishing records, the first, a longnose gar, when he was six years old; his parents, Roberta and Martin, have together logged close to 650 records of their own. The Arosteguis, who half-jokingly describe themselves as the “ugly fish” people, are legendary for pursuing not only standard game fish—grouper, bass, trout—but also a litany of finned curiosities unlikely to appear in Field & Stream. They specialize in catching the largest members of smallish species: a Midas cichlid near Miami, Florida, that tipped the scales at just over a kilogram, a white piranha in Brazil that weighed no more than a pineapple. |
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Around 2010, sampling the world’s marine and aquatic wonders became a goal unto itself for Martini. He began keeping a life list and seeking out oddities, like a birder traveling to the ends of the Earth to glimpse an ivory gull. In the years that followed, he converted his family’s avocation into a career, earning a PhD in fisheries biology from the University of Washington. Yet even as his academic research gravitated toward charismatic ocean giants, like sharks and billfish, the recreational quarry he pursued between semesters seemed to get smaller and smaller. “If you want to rack up numbers,” he says, “you start to realize the majority of the diversity is at the bottom of the food chain.” |
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