Commercialy made extinct, like the Salmon will be.
Saturday » October 6 » 2007
Bluefin tuna in deep trouble, scientists agree
'Drastic action' is needed, experts say, to save the fish seen as a delicacy in several markets
Margaret Munro
CanWest News Service
Saturday, October 06, 2007
The 300-kilogram bluefin tuna that Ewen Clark landed off the coast of Prince Edward Island in late September could have earned him thousands of dollars at auction.
The giants, whose ruby-red meat is savoured by sushi connoisseurs from Tokyo to Toronto, are the most valuable fish in the sea. Prize specimens can sell for as much as $10,000 right off the boat and have been known to command 10 times that much in Japan's markets.
But Clark and his sport fishing team let this one go off Malpeque, P.E.I., after jabbing a $4,000 device into its silvery back to aid a U.S.-Canada research team tracking the imperilled creatures. The device will gather intelligence in the Atlantic for the next year if the fish is able to avoid the countless hooks, nets, traps and harpoons that have been decimating the stocks.
The giant bluefins, which can live as long as 30 years, are at the centre of an escalating international battle. No one knows precisely how many remain in the sea, but most agree they are in serious trouble.
The "western" stock, which once cruised in vast numbers up the eastern seaboard into Canadian waters, is so depleted that American fishermen caught just 12 per cent of their allowable commercial quota in 2006. They expect to do even worse this year.
The stock in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, meanwhile, has been pillaged by what officials describe as an "out-of-control" fishery capturing three times as many bluefins as scientists say should be harvested.
"I am very concerned that the western stock has collapsed, and the eastern (stock) is, if not collapsed, on the verge of collapse," says William Hogarth, chair of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the agency attempting to manage the fish.
He says "drastic action" is needed to save the species, but just how drastic is widely debated. Some scientists are calling for a moratorium on the entire Atlantic bluefin fishery.
"They're catching the last few really big fish," says biologist Carl Safina of the U.S.-based Blue Ocean Institute, who compares the fishery to the dying days of the buffalo hunt. He says the remaining giants are too precious to be carved up on sushi platters and should be left to spawn and rebuild stocks.
Others, like James Jones of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans, say the North American fishery -- which will see several thousand giants killed in Canadian waters this fall -- is not the problem. He says the much heavier toll in European and international waters threatens to doom the stocks. Jones, in tandem with many scientists and U.S. officials, says that fishery must be reeled in to save the creature widely described as the most magnificent fish in the sea.
The warm-blooded bluefins are a metabolic as well as culinary marvel. They are at home in warm tropical waters and in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, according to international research teams. The teams have fitted almost 1,000 giants with cigar-sized tracking tags so sophisticated that they can pick up the flash of light given off by squid as they dart away and the telltale movements the bluefins make as they release milt and eggs on their breeding grounds. The tags automatically fall off after a year, float to the sea surface, and transmit data to the scientists via satellite.
The torpedo-shaped bluefins, which have retractable pectoral fins on the side that make them especially hydrodynamic, have been clocked chasing prey at more than 70 kilometres per hour, diving to depths of more than 2,000 metres and crisscrossing ocean basins. One made the trip across the Atlantic in just 21 days.
But most important, the tags show bluefin from the eastern and western Atlantic often cruise the same water. The two stocks -- the smaller one that spawns in the Gulf of Mexico, and the bigger stock that spawns in the Mediterranean -- frequently intermingle on the foraging and fishing grounds. And they routinely cross the arbitrary line drawn down the middle of the Atlantic by fish managers who have for decades treated the eastern and western stocks as separate.
"The mixing rates are much higher than has ever, ever been suspected," says marine biologist Molly Lutcavage of the University of New Hampshire. She heads a team tagging giants in Canadian waters this fall with Canadian fishers who have volunteered to help.
Clark and his crew aboard the 15-metre long Pura Vida reeled in eight bluefins before the P.E.I. fishery closed late last month. The largest weighed 408 kilograms. Clark says catching bluefins can be lucrative, but the record-breaking fish that sold in Tokyo in 2001 for $173,600 was exceptional. The price paid on Canadian docks ranges from $2 to $34 a kilogram, depending on the quality of the fish. A top-grade fish can sell for $10,000 but the average price is no more than a few thousand dollars.
"Don't make us all look like millionaires," says Clark, who sold six of the bluefin he caught at fish auctions in P.E.I. Four were flown to Japan and two went to the Canadian sushi market. Another two, including one three-metre giant weighing 300 kg, were tagged for Lutcavage and released.
The tracking devices typically report back one year later. One pair of tuna tagged in Nova Scotia waters in 2005 illustrated that tuna from both sides of the Atlantic chase herring and mackerel in Canadian waters. One fish headed for Spain after it left Canadian waters, then swung back through the mid-Atlantic and north along the Gulf Stream before returning to the same spot off Nova Scotia where it had been caught 11 months earlier. The second tuna, tagged one day later, headed south for Mexico to spawn then returned to Canadian waters to feed the next fall.
The findings help explain why bluefin stocks along the east coast of North America are in decline even though the catch in Canadian and U.S. waters has been tightly managed for decades. Researchers say fish from the fragile western stock are being caught on the eastern side of the management line, where bluefin fishing -- much of it illegal -- exploded to feed the lucrative global market for sushi.
The World Wildlife Fund is calling for creation of a sanctuary in the western Mediterranean where bluefins breed. It is also urging ICCAT, which meets in November, to bring in "urgent measures to facilitate stock recovery."
"The Canadian bluefin tuna fishery, it will fall apart completely within five years," predicts Safina.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
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Topic: Tuna going the way of the Dodo (Read 1420 times)