The Pacific bluefin tuna, fished relentlessly for decades, is in trouble.
A report issued this week by fisheries scientists on behalf of fishing nations, including the United States and Japan, shows that decades of uncontrolled overfishing have left stocks vulnerable, with conservationists warning that there is a real possibility of their collapse.
The fisheries scientists, working for an organization known as the International Scientific Committee to Study the Tuna and Tuna-Like Species of the North Pacific Ocean, spell out the crisis in unusually stark language.
The current biomass of the Pacific bluefin ?is near historically low levels and experiencing high exploitation rates above all biological reference points commonly used by fisheries managers,? they write. ?Based on projection results, extending the status quo (2007-2009) fishing levels is unlikely to improve stock status.?
The Pacific bluefin has not drawn the international attention that the Atlantic and Mediterranean varieties have, possibly because the latter two are hunted under the media glare of Western Europe.
But the fact is that overfishing, related partly to the sushi boom, has put all the world?s species of scombrids ? tunas, billfishes and the like ? on the endangered list.
When the Pacific bluefin does gain significant attention, it is often, paradoxically, as a commodity fetish. As my colleague in Tokyo, Martin Fackler reports, a sushi chain owner paid nearly $1.8 million for a bluefin, a record, at an auction on Saturday in Tokyo.
The staggering amounts paid at the annual New Year?s auctions have far more to do with prestige than actual market price ? but the fact that the absolute number keeps going up is consistent with the increasingly scarcity of the resource.
The fisheries scientists? assessment shows the Pacific bluefin population has declined by more than 96 percent from its unfished level. While that level that sounds impossibly high, it is in fact not too far out of line with what has happened to other apex predators like sharks and billfish.
Not surprisingly, Japanese boats are catching most of the fish, the report shows, with Mexico a distant second. Purse seiners, big factory ships that are not selective about the size and age of the fish they catch, do most of the fishing.
And the report shows that the vast majority of the bluefin that are being caught are less than one year old. That is far below the age of sexual maturity, so most of the fish never get a chance to reproduce. It gives no indication of what percentage of those juveniles are then penned up for fattening in tuna ?ranches,? however.
?The responsible thing to do is to stop the fishing until effective management measures are in place that will ensure a reversal of the population decline,? said Amanda Nickson, director of global tuna conservation at the Pew Environment Group.
In theory, the stock of Pacific bluefin, or Thunnus orientalis, is managed by two so-called regional fisheries management organizations, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. The fish are found throughout the north Pacific but are known to spawn only in the western part of that area.
There have been a few halting steps forward. The I.A.T.T.C. set a quota in June 2012 for the eastern Pacific catch for the first time ever, although as one industry news site noted drily, ?The quota is not expected to affect fishers adversely.?
Stock assessments provide the scientific data on which fisheries management decisions are supposed to be based. But the organizations charged with safeguarding the heritage of the oceans have not so far been up to the task where the bluefin is concerned, and the management record of those responsible http:green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/bluefin-fishing-quota-will-rise-only-slightly/ for the Atlantic and Mediterranean variety offers little room for optimism.
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