The music of the fishes: oral traditions teach fishing technology in Sicily. From the article:

Until a few years ago, a mysterious ritual happened on the Egadi (Aegadian) islands off the east coast of Sicily every spring. A tight-knit community of fishermen, following a traditional leader known as a rais, would take to the sea in their boats and begin a chorus of ancient, beautiful songs. The rais led the chorus as well as overseeing the complex fishing routine – known as the mattanza, which literally means “slaughter”.

The mattanza traditionally only occurred for a few days a year. It involved fishing tuna for the community and for sale, while allowing the remaining tuna to reproduce and restore their population over the following months before the ritual began again….

Tuna fishing is tightly intertwined with the cultural history of the entire archipelago, which consists of bigger islands such as Favignana, Levanzo and Marettimo, and a host of smaller islands. Some of them are little more than boulders dropped in the sea. The songs accompanying the mattanza were thought to protect the fishermen on these islands and bring good fortune in their work, but they also passed on important knowledge about when and how to fish in a way that allowed the practice to continue for generations….

Some experts suspect that the mattanza may reflect prehistoric fishing practices. “It is a bloody act of tragic beauty essentially unchanged since the Stone Age,” writes Theresa Maggio in her book Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily. Others, such as French historian Fernand Braudel, suggest that the method came from the ancient Phoenicians, who lived in a region of the Eastern Mediterranean around modern-day Lebanon from around 2500 to 64BC. In this way, the mattanza could be emblematic of the Mediterranean’s cultural melting pot.

Whenever it began, the ritual hinges on the seasonal behaviour of the fish, which swim from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean for their spawning season. “The time that they passed by was very predictable,” says Alessandro Buzzi, the global tuna lead at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) who specialises in tuna fishing. This allowed the fishermen to prepare the tonnara – the intricate structure of nets that would capture their haul….

In the last stage of the fishing ritual, the work and the songs start to synchronise, as all the fishermen adopt the same rhythm to pull the nets from the sea. The final part of the mattanza was the most demanding: the nets had to be raised, while the tuna was harpooned and deposited in large boats. The rhythms of the singing became more rapid and helped coordinate the movements.

There is also a spiritual element to the tradition. Spataro explains that the entrance to the labyrinth of nets was marked by a wooden cross engraved with the names of the saints invoked in the cialome, including Saint Peter, Saint Anthony, and the Madonna del Calvario. The mattanza finished with three cries of Jesus’ name. Anthropologist Elsa Guggino, describing the ritual when it was still an active part of island life, wrote that the songs “recall the moment of creation; the hand of God that moulds everything they describe: the sun and the moon, men, the tuna and the fishing nets”.