Tuna Barons - Part II
by Jeff Della Penna

  In the upscale sushi restaurants of Portland, Portsmouth or Provincetown, white-collar couples belly-up to the sushi bars. As in sushi restaurants all over the world, the customers are served a decorative platter of sashimi (thinly sliced, raw seafood) or nigiri sushi (sashimi balanced on a wad of sushi rice).
  Any New England fisherman worth his pickup truck could easily identify the half-dozen finger-sized slabs of raw sea-animal flesh on the plate, but then, you won’t find a lot of New England bluefin tuna fishermen in sushi bars. And, coincidentally, you won’t find much New England caught bluefin tuna there, either.
  The competition for the lucrative Japanese (and U.S.) sushi market is killing the U.S. fishermen. Facing a market flooded with foreign penned-tuna feed-lot product, the situation is so bleak that most U.S. bluefin fishermen can’t even find the tunnel, never mind see any light at the end of it.
  In 2000, global canned tuna production totaled 1,357,000 tons. In canned tuna, the U.S. is the king of the sea. In 2000, we produced over 304,000 tons, representing 22.5 percent of world production. But the real money is in the raw fish market, and Japan drives that economy, consuming 600,000 tons annually.
  With penned-tuna on the rise and one of the worst U.S. seasons in memory, most U.S. bluefin tuna fishermen are at the end of their line. As one fisherman said, as the tuna season came to a close last month, “We didn’t even catch enough tuna to make a sandwich.” According to Richard Ruais, executive director of The East Coast Tuna Association, things were so bad this last season that Dr. Bill Hogarth, head of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), has agreed to hold a workshop in January to explore all of the possible reasons contributing to the declining early-season availability of giant bluefin tuna over the last several seasons and, in particular, to discuss the poor fishery performance of 2004. Topics for that workshop will include the apparent lack of adequate forage for the bluefin, certain oceanographic anomalies; like changes in the water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, salinity content, and possible resource effects..

In Croatia, two divers herding penned tuna into an area to be processed.

When God Gives You Lemons, You Make Lemonade
   The Japanese are very picky about their product. The fish that they accept are free of any bruises and have been specially butchered. The fish are also checked for fat content. In Japan, the fattiest part of the bluefin is the most prized of all cuts. It’s called “toro,” cut from the bluefin’s belly. It is usually the most expensive item on a sushi menu. Toro is pink and almost opaque. It is identified as either chutoro, which has a moderate fat content, or otoro, light pink in color and extraordinarily tender. Otoro has the highest amount of fat. To a sushi connoisseur, otoro’s richness and tenderness are like butter. To those countries importing to Japan, otoro is like gold.
  Fourteen years ago, the tuna fishermen of Port Lincoln, South Australia were facing much the same situation that the New England area tuna fishermen are facing today. But some of their fishermen decided to try something new. They rounded up schools of tuna at sea with a purse seiner and grew them out in underwater pens just offshore, known in Port Lincoln as “farms”. These farms are basically large feedlots. The fish are grown out for four to six months. An individual fish can gain up to fifteen kilos during this time. Then the fish are butchered to Japanese market standards; no bruises, bled in a particular way, and either shipped fresh, over-night express, or expensively frozen and shipped just slightly slower.
  The idea worked and Port Lincoln moved from catching tuna at sea for canning, with an export value of about $1.25 a kilo — to catching tuna and fattening them in pens for direct sale to the lucrative Japanese market, at $50 per kilo.
  Port Lincoln could be the sister city of any coastal town in Maine, New Hampshire or Mass; basically a cold-water fishing town with about fourteen thousand residents. The difference is that in Port Lincoln, tuna exports exceed $280 million dollars annually. Such ranching isn't practical yet for most species of fish — the tuna pens are economical only because bluefin tuna is worth so much money. The 2,200 tuna held in each pen at Port Lincoln are worth more than $2 million. At night, rent-a-cops patrol the waters around the pens off the shore of Port Lincoln in a Boston whaler with a machine-gun mounted on it.
   Dr. Molly Lutcavage is an Associate Research Professor of Zoology at the University of New Hampshire. Her field of expertise is population biology, physiological ecology, and bluefin tuna. She’s been working on the northern Atlantic bluefin tuna fishery for 12 seasons. She sees the advantages of holding tuna for short periods of time as the market fluctuates, but she’s afraid of the repercussions that tuna farming might have. “First of all, I don’t think any of us know what the immediate long-term effect of tuna farming will be, because there’s so much uncertainty in the population dynamics,” Lutcavage said. “So that makes any predictions regarding the effects of tuna-penning hard.” Lutcavage says there seems to be some givens that are common sense. “If you take too many juveniles out of the population, and they’re taking large numbers of them, of course it’s going to have an impact.”

One of several groups of tuna being hauled over the side at Favignana, Spain.

Evolution Of The Bluefin Fishery
   In Australia, the penned-tuna farm concept was driven by what their fishermen saw as a dramatic reduction of bluefin tuna quotas in the late 1980s. Concern over depletion of wild stocks had forced the imposition of conservative catch limits. The cutback to the quota was aimed at allowing the numbers of their endangered species, southern bluefin, to regenerate naturally. However, several conservation organizations in and around Australia question if the pens have helped or are hurting the species.
   Tuna aquaculture, including hatchery projects, are seen by many as the next logical step in what some call the evolution of the bluefin fishery. The Australians aren’t the only ones looking at the future of tuna production. Japan has a keen interest in keeping a steady flow of sushi-quality bluefin headed toward their marketplace. The Japanese would also like to see supply of quality bluefin increase. Just last September, during the 6th National Tuna Congress, held in General Santos City, Philippines, Gov. Miguel Rene A. Dominguez, of Sarangani Province, announced the creation of a tuna aquaculture project for yellowfin tuna. “If we are to look at the future in 15 to 20 years from now, there are opportunities for the Philippines to be in the forefront of tuna production, considering its big areas for marine aquaculture,” Dominguez said. “What is missing is only the yellowfin tuna hatchery know-how.” The Sarangani Bay project is similar to another project being done at Gondol Station in Bali, Indonesia. Both projects are being supported financially and technologically by Japanese interests.

What Will We Feed Them?
   Tuna are hunters, and their aerobic active lifestyle also make them chow hounds. They would probably be satisfied eating just about anything that swims, but the demand by the Japanese for the highest possible product has taught tuna farmers all over the world to be smart and invest wisely when it comes to fattening up their stocks. The Australians have learned that feeding their tuna certain fish can help to get the oil content up in the meat. At a certain point, the oil content can change the flesh color of the tuna, bringing a higher value for the product at market.
   When the Port Lincoln tuna feed-pens were first created, feeding the tuna wasn’t such a big issue. The waters of Australia were churning with pilchards. But demand for “pillie” put a strain on the Australian fishery, and soon the tuna farms started importing feed. Then two massive pillie die-offs (1995 and 1998) left the Australian fishery in dire straits. To make matters worse, both the mass mortalities of pillie have been traced back to the waters of Port Lincoln, where the imported pilchards were being fed to the penned tuna. One theory is that a virus was introduced to the Australian pillie via imported pilchards at the feed-pens.
   While that’s being worked out, the tuna still need to be fed. So the farmers have had to dip deeper into profits to import more feed. Now herring is shipped from England, Sweden and New England, while the anchovies, another favorite of tuna, make their way to Port Lincoln from California.
   The first question that most people ask is, “What will happen if more tuna farms are created? Won’t that increase the pressure on forage fish?” The answer is logically yes. But, clever entrepreneurs are already working on that problem and they’ve borrowed much from the salmon aquaculture technology.
   Currently, whole fish are still used to feed the trapped tuna during the first period of captivity, to smooth over the transition. Later, many of the pens switch slowly over to pellet feed. The hatchery-raised tuna will, of course, be accustomed to captivity, and can be fed pellets exclusively.
   The Australians have been experimenting with at least 16 different pellet diets. One of the early findings is that the penned-tuna seem to prefer a smaller-sized pellet (thirty millimeters). Scientific research is currently underway to determine whether adding certain vitamins enhances the final product. It’s already been found that extra vitamin E improves flesh color and shelf life.
   As was found in salmon aquaculture, pellets save costs and reduce the bottom line. There’s very little waste, and pellets don’t attract the seabirds. Plus, all of the automated delivery systems for feeding have already been designed for the salmon industry, and, by using that type of equipment, the sites can operate with fewer employees.

Small bluefin tuna caught off the Maine coast this season. With a declining U.S. tuna fishery, NMFS head Bill Hogarth will hold a workshop in January to explore all possible reasons contributing to the declining availability of giant bluefins.

Whose Tuna Are They?
   One of the fundamental questions hovering over the penned-tuna farms has to do with ownership. It’s a question many U.S. fishermen are asking in regard to Mediterranean tuna-pens. In Australia, one incident involving stock losses during tuna towing operations spurred a lot of discussion over quota allocation. Southern bluefin, caught off the Great Australian Bight, are towed in nets to Port Lincoln, where they are transferred to feed-lot sea-cages. At that point, the tuna are counted. But, as Greenpeace points out, purse seine netting can be injurious or lethal to marine life. According to Greenpeace, “It is unknown how many bluefin die while being caught and dragged to shore, or while in the pens.”    Do the dead fish get counted as part of Australia’s take?
   Here’s another interesting aspect of the question, and one that hits a lot closer to home. Richard Ruais has recently distributed information from the Japanese ICCAT (the International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas) delegation, provided by Japanese market industry experts. In that information, the Japanese conclude that 23,125 m.t. of farmed north Atlantic bluefin was produced in 2003. This same information indicates that, for the first six months of 2004, 18,310 m.t. have been placed into farms in the Mediterranean area. Ruais writes that the breakdown of captured tuna is as follows:
   Quantities in Metric Tons
- Spain 5,650
- Malta 3,400
- Turkey 3,250
- Croatia 2,650
- Cyprus 1,030
- Italy 1,000
- Tunisia 830
- Greece 500
   The problem with these numbers, according to Ruais, is that Croatia has only 935 m.t. of ICCAT quota! “And the combined farm catches of Malta, Turkey, Cyprus and Greece (8,180 m.t.) is remarkable, in that they all share in the ‘Others’ quota category,” Ruais writes, “which is set at 1,100 m.t.!” So, whose fish have they caught? The answer, as far as U.S. bluefin fishermen are concerned is, “Our fish!”

The Future, or Future Shock?
   We’ve seen it in the headlines and it’s boldly posted at every aquaculture web site, “Twenty-eight percent of fish stocks worldwide are either over-fished or nearing extinction.” “Forty-seven percent of fish stocks are near the limits of sustainability.” “In waters off the U.S., roughly a third of stocks are in jeopardy.” “Worldwide fish consumption doubled between 1973 and 1997.” “It’s predicted that by 2020, catch will have to increase again by nearly half just to keep up with demand.” “Fishing restrictions won’t solve the problem.”
   We are told that the only answer lies in aquaculture: increasing the supply of fish by farming them as though they were livestock. Already, a third of the annual global fish harvest comes from farms, both on land and in shallow water just offshore. But “they say” today’s methods won't be able to produce the volume of fish needed for the future. Current aquaculture methods are considered too dirty, too costly, and too politically unpopular. We’re being told that the only way of preventing catastrophic over-fishing will require aquaculture on an unprecedented scale. And, that only open ocean projects, part of the “Blue Revolution,” will save the planet. Some say it’s marketing hype to promote aquaculture. Others call it blackmail. Cliff Goudey, director of MIT’s Center for Fisheries Engineering Research, suggests that it’s just evolution.
   Goudey is quoted in WIRED Magazine’s “The Bluewater Revolution” (Issue 12.05 - May 2004), comparing the “Neolithic transformation from hunting and gathering to modern agriculture” to the transition from fishing to open-ocean aquaculture, saying that it will have to take place within a few decades. “If it doesn’t happen,” Goudey says, “I’m afraid we’ll destroy the seas.” (Some of you will remember Goudey from his MIT Sea Grant, 1995 Experimental Pair Trawl Fishery for Tuna in the Northwest Atlantic (report no. MITSG 96-17), in which he supported making mid-winter pair trawling an approved method for landing bigeye, yellowfin and albacore tuna.
   Backed by federal funds, Goudey has been feverishly working on an open ocean sea cage that is 174 feet tall and 270 feet in diameter. He calls his colossal fish pen, “Ocean Drifter”. Goudey sees projects like his as the next generation of aquaculture. Unlike traditional fish pens, which are fixed to the ocean floor, his enormous cage will float, submerged, following certain chosen ocean currents. Goudey’s plan calls for his pens to be equipped with motors to adjust movement. Goudey envisions a fleet of these pens, for example, in the Straits of Florida, filled with fish, and allowed to follow the Gulf Stream for nine months until they have reached their intended market, in, for example, Europe. The grown-out fish would be harvested there and the pens would be refilled with fingerlings and set back out into the currents to continue their journey.
   For both the fishing community and the scientific community, the bluefin tuna fishery seems to be at a crossroads. Lutcavage suggests that there are changes underway in the natural movement of tuna that may also play a major role in the future of a New England fishery. Hogarth’s workshop in January may help to clarify some of the factors. In the meantime, fishermen all over New England are hoping that actions will be taken to stop Mediterranean tuna farmers from dipping any deeper into the northern Atlantic juvenile stocks.