LMS Post ~ Regulators Are Pushing Bluefin Tuna to the Brink

Yeah...just after I did my science project on fish and overfishing...I see this about bluefin tuna being pushed to extinction. If you read anything about the Mediterranean fishing practices, especially those of the Spanish, you know this will likely soon be an endangered species which will then go for top prices as sushi. The international lack of control on the global and local fishing industry is unbelievable. It is this lack of control that will see global fishery collapse as early as 2050. How depressing.

This is the first part of the article, click to read the entire thing.

Regulators Are Pushing Bluefin Tuna to the Brink

The international commission charged with protecting the giant bluefin tuna is once again failing to do its job. Its recent decision to ignore scientists’ recommendations for reducing catch limits may spell doom for this magnificent – and endangered – fish.

by Carl Safina

It’s one of the biggest, fastest, and most beautiful fish in the sea. It has captured the imaginations of people from Homer to Salvador Dali. But end-times loom for the giant bluefin tuna, whose chances of survival were greatly diminished in late November by the international commission charged with its care.

Once again, that body – the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas – refused to take strong action to prevent the runaway overfishing of the giant bluefin tuna in its sole remaining, yet rapidly disappearing, stronghold: the Mediterranean.

One of the sea’s few elite warm-blooded fish, bluefin tuna can reach three-quarters of a ton, swim at highway speeds, migrate across oceans, and visit coasts of distant continents. They’re also the world’s most valued fish (once they’re dead), and therein they hang by the tail.

Too valuable everywhere to be allowed to live anywhere, the giant bluefin tuna may be worth more money to a person who kills one than any other animal on the planet, elephants and rhinos included. A few years ago, a single 444-pound bluefin tuna sold wholesale in Japan for $173,600. One fish.

A 43-nation commission has public-trust management authority and a mandate to conserve. But the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas has for its 40-year history merely acted as the fishing industry’s official, tax-funded conglomerate. Think of it as the International Conspiracy to Catch All the Tuna, and its record starts making sense. The commission’s resume on bluefin tuna graphs as plunging populations, down more than half in the Mediterranean and now free-falling, and down more than 90 percent in the west Atlantic.

The increasing rarity of bluefin—and escalating worldwide sushi madness—has only intensified fishing efforts. And as the fish diminish, demand further drives up the price of bluefin meat. As extinction nears, the fishing keeps escalating.

Fishing has already demolished bluefin populations. The last few decades have seen gold-rush bluefin fisheries disappear off Brazil, in the North Sea, and the southwest Pacific. Wherever they still swim, they are aggressively hunted.

Atlantic bluefin breed in only two places: the Mediterranean and Gulf of Mexico. From these two spawning areas they migrate throughout the whole North Atlantic, mingling in many fishing areas. But fish from these two populations do not interbreed; they are separate breeding stocks that, when not breeding, mix in many areas where they’re fished......

Greenpeace

Bluefin tuna can grow to more than 1,000 pounds and migrate the full length of the Atlantic