In early Japan, the eating of four legged creatures was strictly taboo, save for, perhaps, the wild boar, which they cunningly referred to as a “mountain whale.” And so, logically, the ancient Japanese turned to the sea for their animal protein, thus starting a dependency and culture that has only intensified through the ages. By 1872, they were eating land-animal meats, but still their consumption of fish was massive. As of 2005, Japan was responsible for 10% of the world’s fish consumption. That’s one in ten fish caught anywhere in the world. Japan, perhaps more so than many nations, has tight ties between food and identity. New foods come and go, new techniques of cooking old foods come and go; both food and culture are constantly evolving. And it wasn’t until the latter part of the 20th century that tuna came on hard to the scene. The tuna, it seems, beckons to be eaten. It is what many people want to be—fast and furious and sleek—so for a nation rooted in the credo that “you are what you eat,” these traits are worth a fortune. Suddenly the market was not only good, it was booming, and fishermen were getting as much as $40 or more per pound. Consequently, the fishing industry responded with both technology and effort. Jean-Marc Fromentin, a scientist with the Centre de Recherche Halieutique Mediterranean et Tropical in France, and Joseph E. Powers of the National Marine Fisheries Service in the United States, both work in association with the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT); the group that monitors and regulates the Atlantic bluefin fishery. Fromentin and Powers recently co-published what is considered to be the foremost research on ABFT. In it, they say that by the late 1990’s, the average French purse seiner was twice as long and four times more powerful than it was thirty years before. The new boats also included state of the art global positioning systems, searching equipment, bird radars, sounders, sonar and spotter planes. The improvements in technology, coupled with the exploding market, could lead to only one thing, and soon ABFT were being chased far and wide. The most effort was in the Mediterranean Sea, and by the 1990’s the tuna was running out of places to hide. “Most recently, the fisheries have expanded over the Central and Eastern basins such that ABFT is now exploited over the whole Mediterranean Sea (including off-shore areas) for the first time in its long millennial history,” said Fromentin and Powers. So too did the Japanese drastically expand their fleets – primarily longliners – in the Central North Atlantic. ICCAT scientists said (in a stock assessment draft) that this was “a situation that has never been encountered in the past and that is of high concern since there no longer exist any refuge for BFT in the Med during the spawning season.” Migration The ABFT inhabits a massive part of the globe, a section covering not only the North Atlantic, but it’s adjacent seas as well. For a long time, it was believed that the ABFT stuck to specific locales, spawned in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Mediterranean, and that was that. But scientists now claim that the ABFT has the widest geographical distribution among tunas. The ABFT is not an ordinary fish. Measuring in at over nine feet long and weighing 1,000 pounds or more, the Atlantic bluefin continuously generates its own heat–a property known as endothermy–which allows the ABFT to maintain constant temperatures in their muscle, eye and brain tissue in varying water temperatures. Endothermy, combined with the ability to maintain high speeds (they can swim at speeds in excess of 50mph), give the bluefin an uncanny capacity for not only migrating between cold water feeding grounds and warm water breeding grounds, but for diving to depths of 1000 meters.
It’s been a sad story up and down the east coast for tuna fishermen this summer. Anywhere they find activity–herring and birds and tuna–they also find mid-water trawlers, as many as a dozen at a time, working grid-patterns until the herring are gone. Tuna come to the North Atlantic for the sole purpose of feeding, and when the herring are gone, the tuna are gone as well, typically continuing their sojourn northward to Canada. If it’s not one thing, it’s the other; the problems within the ABFT fishery affect, not only the tuna, but also the fishermen that count on those fish. Rich Ruais is a fisherman and the executive director of the East Coast Tuna Association. He, like so many other bluefin fishermen in the eastern U.S., is upset with both how the stocks have been managed and the trawlers that he competes futilely with. “We’ve been chased from all of our traditional fishing grounds. They’re gone. Over. They [mid-water trawlers] ruin it for us. That’s how they fish,” Ruais said. But Ruais isn’t about to put all of the blame on the trawlers. Not even close. The tuna is a large fish, which covers a large area, which makes for, unfortunately, some large problems. Currently, ICCAT manages ABFT as two stocks—East and West Atlantic—separated by the 45th meridian. The idea is that within the Atlantic, there exists two stocks of tuna, each of which stays on their respective side of the line (with the potential for some “mixing”); the West Atlantic bluefin spawns in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the East Atlantic tuna spawns in the Mediterranean. The bluefin, however, don’t seem to realize that the 45th meridian exists. In the first part of the 20th century, a few hooks used in the North Atlantic were found on fish in the Mediterranean. Later, in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, the use of conventional tags helped to document this migration. More recent studies on ABFT, using state of the art satellite pop-up and implantable tagging methods, now show that the two populations delineated by the 45th meridian, are, indeed, not separate. The studies show that a single population of ABFT spreads across the Atlantic, east to west, north to south. According to Fromentin and Powers, “this delimitation [the 45th] was originally established for management convenience... But with the accumulation of observations from electronic tagging this management structure has been strongly criticized, as higher rates of trans-Atlantic migration than previously suspected have been detected... This hypothesis (which is certainly the best to date) implies that substantial changes in ICCAT management delimitations might be in order.” But such things aren’t clear-cut. The tuna don’t appear to follow any strict migratory routines or patterns; their migrations seem to vary between individual fish and individual years/areas, and scientists aren’t certain if these variations are environmentally driven or not. In Ruais’s Summary of the 2006 Atlantic Bluefin Stock Assessment, he states: “The considerable electronic tagging data-base has in the last few years finally convinced ICCAT scientists that the 45 degree arbitrary management boundary between western and eastern zones is not biologically realistic and certainly has allowed meaningful mortality of western spawned fish east of the management line under much higher quotas for the fleets in the central Atlantic and East Atlantic fisheries...” He goes on to call this dichotomous management practice “the most expensive fishery management boondoggle of all time anywhere in the world.” Fishermen as Environmentalists? On June 6th, 2006, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) demanded “an immediate closure on the [ABFT] fishery” in the Mediterranean and East Atlantic. In the typical world of fisheries news, a statement like that would be heralded as blasphemy. No fisherman wants to hear a cry for closure; and they especially don’t want to hear it from environmentalists. But tuna fishermen on the West Atlantic are seeing what many fishermen do not get to see—a group of fishermen on the other side of the world, fishing for the exact same fish, catching those fish and so thoroughly depleting the resource that there are not enough fish to go around. And all the West Atlantic fishermen can do is stand and watch as the few fish they can catch get driven away by trawlers. “They [the WWF] are right on target for the East Atlantic,” says Ruais. “We’re pleased to see the WWF do their thing. They’re doing a great job exposing the European community and the farming. The European community is the dominating factor and there’s not a cell that’s conservationist. It’s all production.” What’s happening, according to WWF, Ruais, and ICCAT reports, is that the East Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea have become virtual free-for-all fisheries, without regulation or repercussion–so much so that it appears as if the illegal fishing is, basically, government sanctioned. “As has been noted in many SCRS [ICCAT’s Standing Committee on Research and Statistics] documents over the past decade as well as in the 1998 and 2002 stock assessment sessions, most SCRS scientists are highly skeptical about the quality and the quantity of the fisheries data, especially from the Mediterranean…” reads ICCAT’s stock summary draft. “Underreporting general catch and catch of undersized fishes in particular, has been clearly identified in previous SCRS documents and reports and is reemphasized by this Group.” WWF scientists have been busy conducting their own investigation into the Mediterranean fishery. According to them, “Bluefin tuna stocks in the East Atlantic and Mediterranean are being stripped bare by illegal and unscrupulous fishing.” Tom Grasso, director of WWF’s Marine Conservation Policy said, “Without cooperation from the European Union, U.S. efforts to save bluefin tuna populations in the Atlantic will be unsuccessful.” Fishermen in the West Atlantic who abide by TAC limits and observe the closure of the Gulf of Mexico for a breeding ground, get to see their sacrifices in the name of the fishery benefit the outlaws on the other side of the globe. “We’ve been conservation minded and oriented since at least ‘82,” said Ruais. “A bluefin has to be 6’ 1” to be legal in the U.S. We close the spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico for any directed tuna fishing. For any gear type. Scientists now know that mixing of fish that spawn in the Mediterranean and Gulf of Mexico is the overriding factor. We conserve fish here and as soon as they cross the 45th the bluefin are subject to intense fishing pressure. There is no place for bluefin to hide in the Mediterranean. No place.” The East Atlantic In the early 1970’s, ICCAT set the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for the East Atlantic at 32,000mt. It’s estimated that the catch is well over 50,000mt. The fishery in the Mediterranean and East Atlantic lends itself to this discrepancy; boats are rarely held accountable for accurate reporting of catches and with more and more aquaculture/cages it is ever easier for both undersized fish and oversized catches to be hidden. The catches are offloaded into the cages before ever reaching shore, so documentation is difficult and it is easy to mask the volume (and size) caught. “The stock cannot be monitored with confidence and therefore severe overfishing can easily go undetected. The possibility of severe overfishing in the near future is real given the estimated fishing capacity of all fleets,” stated ICCAT scientists. The cages, which are basically feedlots for tuna, enable fishermen to catch undersized fish and grow them to saleable size and quality while in captivity. But the farming is marketable; in the Tsukija market in Japan (Tokyo’s largest fish market), approximately half of the tuna brought in is farmed in Tunisia, Turkey, Spain or Mexico. The fattening continues, and will continue, with the farmed tuna weighing in at roughly 30% otoro-grade fattened flesh. And with the mid-water trawlers putting a large dent in the ABFT’s forage base, the high quality wild tuna is becoming more of a rarity. People’s stomachs and wallets are hard things for scientists or legitimate fishermen to argue with. Between 1996 and 2005, the European Union invested over 26 million pounds into tuna farming alone. The farming, however lucrative for its investors, has punished both fish and fishermen. With the market saturated by farmed tuna, the price has dropped from it’s $15-$30 average in the 1990’s to the current $8 or $9 per pound. “The Mediterranean is – depending on who you talk to – in various stages of collapse,” said Ruais. “There’s no management. They kill too many small fish and catch so many big fish that the spawning unit is collapsing. The Western fishery is somewhat dependent on eastern migrations. The Western stock is somewhat depressed, but it’s stable because we don’t fish it too hard.” Masanori Miyahara was ICCAT’s chairman until 2005. In an interview with British newspaper The Guardian, Miyahara called for the support of others. “Japan, for example, is busy subsidizing the decommissioning of large tuna boats, preventing old vessels being replaced. But the EU [European Union] subsidizes the replacement of purse seiners. Spain is increasing the size of its fishing fleet while ours is contracting. China provides 40% of the production costs of a boat in cash.” Despite all the work being done, there is still a lot that scientists do not know or understand about the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna, and consequently a lot that regulators do not know about them. But as the knowledge base increases, fishermen and scientists alike hope that the standard of international regulation will increase as well. A domestic ICCAT meeting is scheduled for mid October to discuss the U.S. game plan for the international ICCAT meeting, which is November 11th - 26th in Croatia. “There,” Ruais said, “we will come to a head with the European community about the Mediterranean.” |
