Tuna's End

[n2doc]

By PAUL GREENBERG
Published: June 21, 2010

On the morning of June 4, in the international waters south of Malta, the Greenpeace vessels Rainbow Warrior and Arctic Sunrise deployed eight inflatable Zodiacs and skiffs into the azure surface of the Mediterranean. Protesters aboard donned helmets and took up DayGlo flags and plywood shields. With the organization’s observation helicopter hovering above, the pilots of the tiny boats hit their throttles, hurtling the fleet forward to stop what they viewed as an egregious environmental crime. It was a high-octane updating of a familiar tableau, one that anyone who has followed Greenpeace’s Save the Whales adventures of the last 35 years would have recognized. But in the waters off Malta there was not a whale to be seen.

What was in the water that day was a congregation of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a fish that when prepared as sushi is one of the most valuable forms of seafood in the world. It’s also a fish that regularly journeys between America and Europe and whose two populations, or “stocks,” have both been catastrophically overexploited. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of only two known Atlantic bluefin spawning grounds, has only intensified the crisis. By some estimates, there may be only 9,000 of the most ecologically vital megabreeders left in the fish’s North American stock, enough for the entire population of New York to have a final bite (or two) of high-grade otoro sushi. The Mediterranean stock of bluefin, historically a larger population than the North American one, has declined drastically as well. Indeed, most Mediterranean bluefin fishing consists of netting or “seining” young wild fish for “outgrowing” on tuna “ranches.” Which was why the Greenpeace craft had just deployed off Malta: a French fishing boat was about to legally catch an entire school of tuna, many of them undoubtedly juveniles.

Oliver Knowles, a 34-year-old Briton who was coordinating the intervention, had told me a few days earlier via telephone what the strategy was going to be. “These fishing operations consist of a huge purse-seining vessel and a small skiff that’s quite fast,” Knowles said. A “purse seine” is a type of net used by industrial fishing fleets, called this because of the way it draws closed around a school of fish in the manner of an old-fashioned purse cinching up around a pile of coins. “The skiff takes one end of the net around the tuna and sort of closes the circle on them,” Knowles explained. “That’s the key intervention point. That’s where we have the strong moral mandate.”

more

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/27Tuna-t.html

[Syrinx]

1. tuna's end...

I'll let you make your own jokes...

Paul Greenberg was a neocon before neocons were cool.

[eowyn_of_rohan]

2. Why won't people stop eating or asking for endangered fish ?

Are they unaware of what they're contributing to or just selfish greedy jerks? Screw their sushi :mad:

[Art_from_Ark]

4. Maybe they don't know they're contributing

Are all tuna endangered. or just bluefin?

[eowyn_of_rohan]

7. They know. See post 3 below - a Japanese article regarding scarcity of Bluefin

[Art_from_Ark]

8. Well, I live in Japan

and this is the first time I've heard of it. The article is in English as well, so it would not be widely read by the Japanese population at large.

I did find on Google Japan someone's blog celebrating the defeat of the proposed moratorium on bluefin ("kuro-maguro") fishing. It was pretty disgusting, I thought. I like tuna, but if this species is threatened, there are plenty of other foods available in Japan that are not endangered. It's not like people here are going to go hungry if they can't get their bluefin. I will try to spread the word about bluefin among the Japanese I know.

[eowyn_of_rohan]

9. Well, maybe your population is kept in the dark by your MSM

we can all identify with that. That said, news of dwindling bluefin tuna population has been coming down for quite some time. Please do spread the word.

[XemaSab]

14. I know that albacore are still fairly abundant off California

There's a big fishery here for them.

[Bonobo]

3. "Hope on the horizon for limitless bluefin tuna"

Hope on the horizon for limitless bluefin tuna

Just as people in Japan had begun to resign themselves to the idea that eating coveted fatty tuna may soon no longer be possible, mackerel has appeared as an unexpected savior.

The background to this was a proposal to ban international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna. The proposal was defeated at the recent meeting of parties to the Convention of International Trade on Endangered Species (CITES), but it could be reactivated at any time.

It turns out there may be a way to bolster the tuna population by using mackerel to breed the much sought-after fish.

Though female tuna release hundreds of thousands of eggs at each spawning, the number that reaches maturity in the wild is close to zero. However, if mackerel raised in captivity for about a year can be made to lay tuna eggs, tuna fry could be obtained inexpensively and in large amounts.

More at:

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201006130180.html

This is not aquafarming, although there have been tremendous strides made in tuna aquafarming techniques by Japan in the last decade. Aquafarming has its limits because of the dangers of tuna eating their own excrement when penned in -even in relatively large size "cages".

[petronius]

11. Kind of a freaky approach, but cool if it works.

I'm not sure why he needs the mackerel, however - if tuna can be kept in pens it seems like you could just keep a small number of breeding tuna and release all the fry. With fewer fish in the the pen, you wouldn't need to worry about the poop issue. But I guess it's worth it because the franken-mackerel can be kept in much larger numbers in much smaller spaces?

It also strikes me as odd that his first work was making salmon spawn trout. I'd have thought the other direction would be more useful, but perhaps Japan has more salmon than rainbows...

[msongs]

5. when the tuna are extinct, the tuna eaters can eat each oth.....hmmm nt

[Angry Dragon]

13. republicans already eat their young

[G_j]

6. just a side note, Bluefin are absolutely beautiful

awesome fish

[flvegan]

10. Operation Blue Rage: Sea Shepherd frees 800 bluefin from nets in Libya

Their statement that all the catches were caught on the 14th sounded much too convenient, so we asked to examine the fish for juveniles. We were refused. I then put the bow of the Steve Irwin onto the cage so we could look into the cage from the bow to examine it further.

Suddenly, the Maltese vessel Rosaria Tuna rammed the Steve Irwin on the aft port side and slid alongside the port rail, as a fisherman tried to violently gaff Sea Shepherd crewmembers with a long, sharp-hooked pole.

The Steve Irwin crew retaliated with 8 liters of rotten butter forcing the fishing vessel to retreat and to stand off.

At 1530 hours, the two fishing vessels circled their cages defensively and the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin stood off to notify ICCAT (International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna) of possible violations. They did not respond.

The Jean Charcot, the ICCAT inspection vessel will not venture south of 33 Degrees 40 Minutes North.

With two fishing vessels containing angry Italian crews, there were risks involved with getting into the water to assess the bluefin catch. But if the catch was illegal, Sea Shepherd divers knew they must cut the nets and free the bluefin tuna.

Sometimes it is necessary to do what needs to be done despite the risks. The risk of losing the bluefin tuna as a species is far more important than the risks to our own lives and freedom.

And so we decided to free the tuna.

At 1600 hours, a five-person dive crew entered one of two cages being towed by the Italian fishing vessel Cesare Rustico.

As the Steve Irwin held off the Cesare Rustico and the support ship Rosaria Tuna, the Sea Shepherd crew dove into the net to identify the size, age, and quantity of the bluefin tuna within. Once it was clearly established that the cage was overstocked and that a high percentage were juveniles, Sea Shepherd divers freed the 700-800 tuna.

It is our position that the bluefin tuna we freed from that cage held a large number of juveniles and that the fish were caught after the official closure of the season. It is also our position that the fish that we freed exceeded the quota.

http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/news-100617-1.html

I'm glad to see Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd actively doing something.

[Swamp Rat]

12. Soylent Green is starting to look more like a possibility than a fiction every day