What a sad story about blue fin tuna (see here, here, here, here and here for a flavour of it, and here to see images of this magnificent fish).
It’s pretty much the usual story – overfishing drives down the size of the fish stocks, drives down the size of the average fish and pushes up the prices. High prices mean that those still in the industry are keen to keep fishing and it’s always the fishing interests which say that there are plenty of fish left in the sea – until they are gone!
At least the UK was on the right side in this debate (see here and here).
Blue fin tuna were once much commoner – there’s a fishing village in one of my favourite parts of Spain which was named after the fish that were once so much more important to the fishermen – Zahara de los Atunes.
But it’s not just in far away places that these amazing fish were present. In a report produced by Natural England the other week which documents the losses of English wildlife over the millenia, centuries and decades, there is an amazing photograph of a happy group of recreational fishermen off the Scarborough coast with a boatful of rod-caught blue fin tuna as recently as 1933. I read that observations of blue fin tuna in the North Sea date back to 1912 when they were noticed feeding on herring falling from fishing nets as they were hauled on board. An English sport fishery grew up in the 1930s, catching up to 80 fish a year. But the Norwegian commercial fishery grew to over 200 boats landing over 10,000 tonnes a year during the 1950s - in the 1960s catches collapsed and the abundance of the fish is still too low to support either recreational or commercial fishing.
Maybe climate change played some part in the fish's demise but our ability to hoover up fish stocks to the point of extinction is unfailingly stupid. If there were ever a system where a bit of restraint is in the long term interests of the industry, and the wildlife on which it so crucially depends, then it is fisheries. We aren't really treating the Earth as though we mean to stay.
Yes Mark if only we all would treat the Earth with more respect,ironic that all supermarkets seem to have special offers of 3 tins of Tuna at a special price.
Hi Mark,
Like you I was very disappointed at the CITES result for Bluefin Tuna. If it was anything but a fish they would have been listed long ago! At this rate is there any chance for threatened fish syocks to recover?
Sooty - it's difficult to know what to do when faced with a supermarket shelf, isn't it? Sometimes it's impossible to know what the 'good and green' purchase would be.
Kat Tai - we are doing a very bad job on fish stocks - and the science is very clear. Makes you wonder about our chances to fix more complex problems.