vignettes: the last blue fin tuna

8/9/2019 VIGNETTES: The Last Blue Fin Tuna

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Who Will Be the One

toSashimithe Last Bluefin Tuna?

It Could Happen Within Ten Years.


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Until the advent in the 1970s of the Japanese market for large bluefin tuna (Thunnusthynnus), bluefins were banned for human consumption in the United States andCanada because of high mercury levels in the flesh. The noble fish sold for ten ortwenty cents a pound as of 1970, and were ground up for pet food. Many of thesemagnificent giants were simply tossed on the rubbish heap. In 1971 I used to see

1200-pounders brought in daily to the sport fishing dock in East Gloucester (MA).There they were weighed and photographed, then hauled to the dump.

In 1971 Japanese market demands forsashimi started driving prices steadily upward.Before long, bluefins were worth a fortune. Within ten years a big one fetched$10,000. People went crazy. It was like gold fever. And the scarcer tuna got, thehigher prices went. By 1992 the Japanese were reportedly paying $55 a pound. It

was said that a big fish in prime condition could fetch $50,000 right over the rail. Inearly 2001 a 400-pound bluefin netted the fisherman $64,000. $160 a pound! More

recently, a restaurant in Japan paid $175,000 for one bluefin! Prices have sincedeclined, but consumer demand is rising in Europe, China, Russia, and the UnitedStates. Unless drastic protective action is taken and soon the species facesextinction. And the only meaningful action is for people to stop eatingsashimi.

Why should anyone care whether we wipe out the bluefin tuna? Theyre not cute andcuddly, like pandas. Theyre not cute and bright, like dolphins. Or gentle giants, like

whales. But theyare one of the biggest, fastest, and most beautiful fish ever to grace

Northern Bluefin Tuna (Thunnys thunnus) Image in public domain because it contains materials that originally came from NOAA.


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the oceans. Theyre powerful swimmers, their bodies almost perfectly streamlined.And to minimize drag, they can retract their fins into slots. Theyre calculated to reachsixty miles per hour. Theyve been clockedwell into the fifties.

There is a series ofphotographs called The

Chase taken off NomansLand Island, near Martha's

Vineyard, in 1986. Thephotographs show a giantbluefin tuna, weighing over900 pounds, leaping,missing, leaping again, andcapturing an Atlanticbluefish about two feetlong. The giant bluefin hasall the designcharacteristics of a fighter

jet: supremely taperedshape, short fins likeabbreviated wings,extreme speed.

Those photographs offera rare glimpse into the truemajesty of these creatures.That bluefin was aboutnine feet long, with a burst

speed roughly ten times itsbody length--90 feet per second, or about 60 miles per hour, through water. Water is780 times as dense as air. Thanks to its supreme physiology and immense strength,that 900-pound animal was able to fly through its liquid medium at highway speed

with a self-generated equivalent of over 50 horsepower.I wish Id written that. Sounds like Rigneys In Pursuit of Giants (Penguin 2011)

deserves a read. I know what hard work it takes to write nature books. Ivepublished two,A Dolphin

Summer(Taplinger 1985)and Orcas of the Gulf(Sierra Club 1990). Greatreviews. Out of print, butIve re-released Orcasthrough iUniverse andplan to do so with

Dolphin. End of plug.

Pacific Bluefin Tuna pursuing preythat has just re-entered the water.

Photos by Paul Murray. Quoted text by Matt Rigney, Author,In Pursuit of Giants

Credit: Steve Dykes/Los Angeles Times


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Is giving upsashimi too much to ask? Do it foryoursake, as well as that of the fish.Sure, there are articlespro and con about the hazards of mercury poisoning, but whyrisk it? You know you cant trust any data on a subject this politically loaded. Why didthe government ban it forty years ago, yet turn a blind eye when thesashimi marketboomed? And mercury aside, what other risks are you running by eating raw fish?

There are rewards to be gained. A return to the oceans of forty years ago may be toomuch to expect, but any steps in that direction would be a great gift to your kids. And

what do I mean by the oceans of forty years ago? Well, for example, in 1970 you couldhave cruised Stellwagen Bank of a summer and thrilled to the sight of giant bluefintuna breaching from horizon to horizon. (Map of Stellwagen overleaf) Bluefin schoolscovering several acres were far from rare. And their smaller cousins, the mackerel,seemed limitless. Tinker mackerel were so plentiful that when my sons and I set outfor a day of fishing, we never bothered to bring bait from shore. We just lowered amackerel-jig over the side, almost anywhere, and caught all the tinkers we needed(kept them in a fish well survivors released). Twenty-inch mackerel for the grill? Noproblem. Groundfish were still plentiful, too; almost at will, we caught haddock for thetable. With any cod we caught, I made a delicious chowder. I had a dozen favoritespots along the coast where I usually caught the species I preferred.I used to lecturemy sons and guests that we never kept a fish we didnt plan to eat.

Have you ever known a sea this bountiful? No? Im very sorry you missed it.


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Stellwagen Bank, the major inshore escarpment where whales and top predatoryfishes gather to feed, has been declared a national sanctuary. It extends fromGloucester in the north (Cape Ann) to Provincetown in the South (Cape Cod).


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Some Interesting Facts about Bluefin Tuna

Bluefins appear at about the same time in all parts of the Gulf of Maine. Fishermenin Nova Scotia and Cape Ann as well as Cape Cod count on the fish arriving by mid-to late June. This simultaneity occurs because the fish ride the Gulf Stream northfrom their spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico, then form schools according tosize and head inshore at various points along the coast to spend the summerfeeding. The size of bluefin tuna seen feeding inshore increases south to north, from"footballs" off the Virginia coast to 900 pounds average around Nova Scotia. Thelarger the bluefin, the better it can withstand cold water, and cold water supportsmore food.

Bluefins fall into three closely related species; Thunnus thynnus in the Atlantic,Thunnus orientalis in the Pacific, and Thunnus maccoyii in Australian waters. Of allthe stocks, the West Atlantic bluefin is in the worst shape, at just 10 percent of its1970 population level and dropping fast. A full decade ago, biologists sternly adviseda shutdown of the West Atlantic fishery. U.S. tuna exporters had their own analyststweak the data, and the quota was increased.

Bluefin Tuna Antonio Medina Guerrero, U 1


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But the West Atlantic quota of 2,700 metric tons is far more than can be caught. U.S.fishermen landed only 27 percent of their quota in 2005 and just 10 percent in 2006.There just arent as many bluefins left as the fishing industry would like to think.Giants (270 pounds or more), were so heavily exploited that most bluefins seen inthe Gulf of Maine by 1990 were in their ninth year or less and weighed only a few

hundred pounds. Scientists believe the West Atlantic bluefin will be extinct withinten years.

Bluefins in the Gulf of Maine often feed with whales. One fisherman told me that ona third of his 1985 trips, he had seen tuna mingling with whales. He saw one bigfinback followed by a large group of tuna, each about four feet long (about 400

pounds). When the finback took a turn, the tuna followed.Another fisherman recalled seeing a dozen giant bluefin tuna swimming

alongside humpbacks to catch sand lances dribbling from the whales' mouths.Some humpbacks slapped the tuna away with their flippers.

Young Bluefin Tuna (photo by Open Cage/Info Pics/Large_743: asap)


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Not that we need more somber thoughts, but the current decline in bluefin tunastocks may be coinciding with natural cycles. One Provincetown fisherman, then

(1988) in his eighties, recalls that when he was a lad, some old fishermen (old then -long since dead) could remember a time when there were no "horse mackerel"(bluefin tuna) caught in the Truro traps. This decline may have occurred around1860-1865. I hazard this guess because bluefins were scarce in Massachusetts Bayfrom 1902 to 1904, then again in 1943, after which the stock slowly built back up to apeak in 1948. The data stop at 1951, but they hint at a forty-year cycle in bluefinstocks. We now appear to be at another natural low point, which would make thespecies all the more vulnerable to human exploitation.

This is how a school of hunting bluefins might appear. They materialize out of theblue haze of distance as a sweeping arc of tuna, fifteen or twenty in all, spaced atsuch precise intervals that they form a nearly perfect parabola, its concave sidefacing forward. As prey fish are forced into the focal point of their formation, thebluefins close ranks and catch what they can, then regroup and continue theirparabolic sweep.

The bluefin tuna in this hunting school are about four feet long, each weighingsome 400 pounds. Handsomely streamlined, they have dark blue backs, whitebellies, and white flanks with silvery spots. Their colors fade to a uniform dull gray

No photo credit shown published in the UKIndependent


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soon after death, so anglers landing bluefins have little time to appreciate the beautyof their catches.There appear several more schools of bluefins, each containing tuna of about thesame size. The smaller the tuna, the larger the schools seem to be. Some solitaryadult bluefins, eight or nine feet long and weighing eight hundred to a thousand

pounds, flash by at forty to fifty knots. The largest bluefins seem to travel alone forthe most part, perhaps because theyre so fast that they have less need ofcooperative hunts. But the big adults do form cooperative groups when needed, tocontain large schools of prey.

Excerpted from A Dolphin Summer(Gormley, Taplinger 1985).

I think theyre worth saving. I hope you do, too. Thanks for reading this. Yourcomments are cordially welcomed.


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vignettes: the last blue fin tuna

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