Much of the fish on dinner tables in Europe and the United States comes from West African waters. Along the 448 miles of the coast of Senegal, as well as mechanised boats, there are some 21,000 pirogues, carvel-built plank boats constructed shell-first on a keel made of a single, scooped trunk of wood. Last September, Anna Badkhen moved from the US to Senegal to work on the pirogues and research a book. For Granta magazine, she reports on “life on the shifting tideline between plenty and nothing: the haul and cast of fishing at the time of the Anthropocene”.