Homepage             Back to October 2008 Issue

Sardinia, Italy 1998. Enourmous nets haul large numbers of big bluefin tuna. Courtesy of United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
There was a lack of independent scientists at the Bluefin Working Group meeting in Madrid, Spain, and another quota-cut may be heading to coastal U.S. waters. The meeting was held from June 23rd to July 4th, and scientists from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) were present.

The Bluefin Working Group is a subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics (SCRS) for the Inter- national Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT).

“The final science recommendation,” wrote Rich Ruais, who is a U.S. ICCAT advisory committee member, “will likely be to reduce the West to 1,500 mt quota or lower.” This reduction, if it does occur, would fall in the wake of a reduction from 2,700 mt to 2,100 mt in the past few years, and Ruais worries that future quotas will follow suit.

But U.S. tuna fishermen haven’t even filled their quotas in the last several years. The 2007 catch came in at 1624 mt, nearly 500 mt short of the 2,100 mt quota. One of the industry’s concerns surrounding the unused quota is that countries such as Canada and Mexico are in line to take that portion of U.S. bluefin and swordfish quotas.

According to Ruais, the U.S. isn’t using their entire quota due to “excessive, unilateral restrictions, particularly size of fish restrictions on bluefins and closed domestic fishing grounds for swordfish.”

In April of 2008, scientists at the World Symposium for the Study into the Stock Fluctuations of Northern Bluefin Tunas reiterated what many tuna fishermen have been asserting for years: “Atlantic bluefin tuna might be seen as a metapopulation constituted by sub-populations that have varied in size in response to environmental changes and overfishing.” Also supporting the metapopulation findings are the recent advances in otolith microchemistry, which is able to identify birth origins by studying the bluefin’s earbone.

What a metapopulation means is that instead of bluefins existing in separate stocks on separate sides of the Atlantic, those stocks mix and migrate. A bluefin born in the Gulf of Mexico, which is closed for fishing during spawning, can later be killed as an adult spawning fish by a Canadian fisherman in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or a European fisherman in the Mediterranean.

Thus, U.S. conservation might be carrying foreign fleets while stepping on the domestic fleets’ feet. And with both ICCAT and the World Wildlife Fund estimating East Atlantic / Mediterranean catches as ranging between 43,000 mt and 70,000 mt, since 1996 (as compared to the West at roughly 2,500 mt since 1981), that’s a lot of tuna that leave U.S. waters, never to return. But there are signs that U.S.’s conservation efforts are working, albeit for another country: the catch per unit effort (CPUE) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence has steadily increased from 1997 to 2003. Still, the incredible overfishing in the East is a major concern.

ICCAT SCRS scientists said that a “vast area of the Mediter-ranean nowadays were covered by bluefin tuna fishing over its entire surface, a situation that has never occurred in the past and that is of high concern since there appears to no longer exist any refuge for BFT in the Mediterranean during the spawning season.”

In Madrid, the EC (European Community) used the metapopulation conclusion as another reason to delay their management in the East Atlantic and Mediter- ranean. A recent attempt by the EC for an early closure on the Mediter- ranean resulted in violent protests.

“The advice and facts are clear: we cannot rebuild the resource by conservation in the West alone,” wrote Ruais. “We most definitely cannot make progress conserving western bluefin assemblages or restoring the western fishery without initiation of conservation in the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern Atlantic, particularly with 30% of our giants migrating to unregulated eastern fishing grounds.”

According to ICCAT, “The modeling results considered by the Group [the Bluefin Working Group] this year confirm its previous conclusion that the state of the population in the western Atlantic is sensitive to mixing, and that the fishery in the eastern Atlantic potentially has an important impact on the western Atlantic.”

It is clear that the bluefin tuna, which lives in excess of 32 years and is capable of diving over 3,000 ft deep, doesn’t recognize political boundaries, but lives in the immensity of the Atlantic ocean, ranging from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mediterranean and north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Management efforts need to coincide with what they seek to manage, and the U.S. and the EC must learn to transcend those political boundaries and operate in a framework dictated by the bluefin tuna. Data source tunanews.org

homepagearchivessubscribeadvertising