Fish Are Friends, Not Food

By Janae Tanti

The Bluefin Tuna has been consumed by humans for centuries, since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century, when the raw food trend began, that the human demand for tuna meat outweighed the ocean’s supply. As the sushi and sashimi industries are continuing to flourish, the earth’s Bluefin tuna population is hopelessly floundering.
Scientists across the globe are in a race against time to save these fish, applying scientific technologies and advancements to breeding the Bluefin in captivity, but more immediate results are needed in order to save the Bluefin from extinction. Without an increased public awareness and a reform in politics, the Bluefin tuna will cease to exist within two years.
When scientists tried to build a mechanical, “perfect” fish in the 1990’s, they used the Bluefin Tuna as a model. Its size and speed make it one of the most incredible fish in the sea. With its scimitar-shaped tale, the blue fin tuna can reach speeds up to forty miles per hour and are capable of migrating across entire oceans. Similar to a mammal, the Blue fin Tuna is warm-blooded, maintaining a body temperature of eighty-one degrees Fahrenheit. It can reach a weight of up to one thousand five hundred pounds and a length of ten feet.
But the belly meat of the Bluefin tuna is considered a delicacy across the globe, making it not only one of the most incredible fish in the sea- but one of the most hunted.
With the sushi and sashimi industries’ increasingly high demand for the Bluefin Tuna, tuna may be one of the most sought-after fish in the sea- but they are becoming increasingly hard to find.
The recent quota of Bluefin Tuna caught, set by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) in November of 2009, is 13,500 tons- 5000 tons more than the suggestions of scientists. Based on models of the Blue fin tuna’s population dynamics, scientists have claimed that 8,500 (or less) would help “halt overfishing and given a 90 percent chance of rebuilding stocks by 2019,” according to an article published in The Economist titled Changing Tides. At this rate, according to the World Wildlife Fund, the population of Bluefin tuna of the reproducing age will be completely wiped out by 2012.
It is no wonder the Bluefin Tuna has been described as “the most endangered of all large fish species” by Richard Ellis, a marine conservationist.
The Bluefin tuna has not always been in such high demand as it is today. In the early twentieth century, tuna was considered nothing more than horse mackerel, and was used in the production of dog and cat food. The raw food movement is a recent phenomenon, with the consumption of sushi and sashimi becoming popular around the middle of the twentieth century.
The Bluefin has always been caught in sport fishing- considered quite the trophy due to its size, but its population did not begin to diminish until the 1950’s when the purse-seining and long-lining fishing techniques emerged in order to supply the amount of tuna needed for the up-and-coming sushi industry.
The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) was established in 1969 in order to protect the Bluefin tuna by setting international quotas for annual catching, but its methods were ineffective. ICCAT had based its quotas on incorrect scientific data.
It was once believed that there were two separate Bluefin populations-one that bred in the Gulf of Mexico and stayed in the western Atlantic and another that spawned in the Mediterranean and foraged in the eastern part of the ocean. But tagging experiments concluded that while there were two breeding grounds, the two different populations could swim across the ocean, causing the two populations to overlap.
ICCAT based its quotas on this two-population belief, setting strict catching restrictions in the western Atlantic but allowing a larger amount of tuna to be caught in the eastern Atlantic, causing the entire population of fish to diminish.
Fish farming, or fish ranching, has become common practice, supplying much of the world’s tuna. The survival of the Bluefin is impossible with the fish farming occurring throughout the Mediterranean. There are rules banning the catching of undersized tuna from the Mediterranean, but none prohibiting the catching of immature tuna and taking them to a marine ranch to be fattened up.
“Every country on the Mediterranean (except Israel) takes advantage of this loophole and maintains tuna ranches offshore. The fishers from Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Croatia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Malta are capturing half-grown tuna by the hundreds of thousands, according to Richard Ellis.
The tuna are captured, pumped full of feeder fish for six months to a year, then shipped off to Japan, who consumes around 80 percent of the tuna caught around the world each year.
Tuna farming guarantees the extinction of the Bluefin tuna. By catching the fish before they are old enough to breed and keeping them penned up until they are killed, there is no possible way for the population to grow.
When viewed from an economical perspective, it is obvious that the decreased population of Bluefin Tuna is directly related to the sushi and sashimi industries. As the tuna populations continue to fall, the Japanese demand for toro (the belly meat) is increasing.
Fewer tuna will mean higher prices, and higher prices will mean intensified fishing. Intensified fishing will, of course, result in fewer tuna.
Bluefin tuna is extremely expensive; the highest recorded price for a single fish was paid in 2001 at the price of $173,600. These high prices attract more and more fisheries, which use such methods as purse seining, which will result in a complete decimation of the Bluefin tuna population. The question is now being asked, how can enough tuna be supplied to the sushi and sashimi industries without allowing the extinction of the Bluefin tuna?
One solution to the overfishing of Bluefin Tuna would be to list the fish as being threatened with extinction by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and imposing a ban on international trading. A ban on international trading is generally considered to be harmful (by economists), but in the case of wildlife there are four conditions that must be met in order for it to be considered helpful:
“First, the species in question must be seriously threatened by international trade. (If the problem is habitat loss, domestic use or disease, a trade ban will not help.) Second, bans must be coupled with measures to reduce demand. Third, they must not undermine incentives to conserve endangered species in the wild. And lastly they must be supported by the governments and citizens where the species lives,” according to CITES.

All four conditions are met in the case of the Bluefin tuna, but a ban on international trade was denied at the March 2010 CITES meeting in Doha, Qatar, where the Bluefin tuna was not included in the list of species threatened with extinction. In an article in The Economist Sue Mainka, head of the delegation from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, says the delegates sent to the CITES meetings consist of officials from trade and fishing ministries, rather than wildlife and environmental officials. With the decision being one based on politics rather than scientific data, the ban on international trade will (most likely) not occur in the near future.
The fate of the Bluefin tuna cannot lie in the hands of the law- as a result, it has turned toward science.
At the Kinki University’s Ohshima Experiment Station, fisheries biologists have successfully bred Bluefin tuna from eggs to mature fish, and are currently rearing third-generation Bluefins. The ultimate goal of the Experiment Station is to supply all of the farmed tuna harvested in Japan. The program has come a long ways in their thirty years of operation, but there is still a long ways to go until they are breeding the amount of tuna needed in the Japanese industry.
The Experiment Station hopes to supply up to 20,000 juvenile tuna to the fish farms this year, but that is only a fraction of the amount demanded.
Bluefin tuna have proved to be difficult to breed in captivity- it took the Experiment Station four years to learn to keep the tuna alive then another five to get them to spawn. The size and speed of the Bluefin also have proved to be an obstacle. Their long length and their need to continuously move in order to force water over their gills require a much larger area of captivity.
After many years of tweaks and adjustments, the Experiment Station enabled six fish to spawn in 1995, and 16 from the class of 1996 survived to adulthood. Those fish spawned in 2002, and they are now rearing the third generation. While the journey will be a long one, the group at Kinki University is producing results that may lend a helping hand in the restocking of the ocean’s Bluefin tuna.
The Clean Seas Aquaculture Growout, owned by the Stehr Group in Port Lincoln, South Australia, is well on its way to breeding Bluefin tuna at a commercial level.
At their hatchery in Arno Bay, the fish are kept in a 790,000 gallon tank, where optimum conditions for spawning are obtained. The length of daylight hours, air temperature, water temperature and even the currents can be made to replicate certain dates when spawning is known to occur. The only condition that is not present in the tank is depth. The Clean Seas group is praying that isn’t a critical factor of spawning. Only time will tell if this multi-million dollar experiment will work, but the Stehr Group remains enthusiastic.
When asked if the success of the project would change the way Bluefin Tuna are perceived in Australia, Marcus Stehr, the managing director, answered “It’s not a question if, mate-it’s when,” according to an article by Ellis.
The NOAA Laboratory located here in Charleston on James Island is also doing its part in the race to save the Bluefin Tuna. Efforts are being made to collect small Bluefin tuna in order to evaluate the otoliths of the juvenile fish.
Otoliths are the fish equivalent of ear bones, and can reveal a fish's time and place of birth, the waters it has travelled, even which days it grew well. This information will help answer the question of how integrated the two populations of Bluefin (western and eastern) actually are. The Laboratory at James Island is collecting the othliths of small Bluefins and sending them to research laboratories as requested.
Through scientific advancement and attempted captive breeding, the Bluefin Tuna population’s chance of recovering has slightly increased, but not at a rate at which will ensure the survival of the species. If scientific hypothesis are correct, the Bluefin tuna will be no more in two years time.
With the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, who knows if the Bluefin even have two years left before their numbers are completely wiped out.
The effort to save these fish must be thrust into overdrive. The effort to breed the Bluefin in captivity is one that requires much patience, with many trial and error tests and re-tests. In the future it is probable that captive breeding will aid in the restocking of the tuna population, but it cannot be relied on to be their immediate savor.
An increase in public awareness of the Bluefin tuna’s struggle is where the fish’s fate lies.
Public awareness could lead to a demand for reform of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas catching quotas, as well as leading the CITES to declare tuna as threatened with extinction, resulting in a trading ban. These political reforms would buy time for biologists to perfect the breeding of Bluefin tuna in captivity. Without these reforms, there will be no tuna left on the planet to save.