F R O M   T H E   C R O W E ’ S   N E S T

Make It Happen



The bluefin tuna season is starting up in New England. What's different this year, according to tuna fishermen, is that the season appears to be more normal, with a lot of fish in the water and more herring for them to fatten on. The prospects for price are better and the likelihood of a profitable fishing year seems good. New England tuna fishermen have fought for decades for forage fish and that effort may be bearing fruit.

What remains the same is that Wicked Tuna, which popularizes tuna fishing, is entertainment. National Geographic, the producer, is a successful corporation that profits from the program. The Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean industrial tuna fisheries are enormously profitable. But none of these entities have contributed a dime to the improved condition of the bluefin tuna resource and fishery.

Funding of large-pelagics science in the U.S. was gutted by Congress in the last Bush administration. Some large-pelagics research has withered or disappeared. The University of Massachusetts’ Large Pelagics Research Center (LPRC) in Gloucester, Mass., the leading science center of its kind, has struggled to continue its work bringing a new understanding of bluefin tuna – a species held in awe since the dawn of civilization, yet which remains less understood than the goldfish sold at the mall.

This ignorance remains the clay-footed foundation on which international tuna management plans are based. It was only good science from the LPRC that confirmed the mixing of East and West Atlantic bluefin tuna. It was that science which enabled the U.S. and environmental groups internationally to demand more International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas compliance recently from Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean countries. The LPRC also discovered the lower age of maturity for bluefin. This will be enormously important to the fecundity and future of the bluefin resource. These breakthroughs came from years of solid science by dedicated professionals and collaborative work with fishermen. No politics, no agenda, no sleight-of-hand faux science for funders.

The economic beneficiaries of continued vitality in the bluefin fishery may not individually be able to fund continued research. But the beneficiaries are all voters, they are all taxpayers represented by someone in Congress, and they all know what they can and should do to reinstate highly migratory species research. Make it happen.