It all seemed so easy. You popped to your local supermarket for your favourite sandwich filling, safe in the knowledge that the tuna you were buying ticked all the right environmental boxes.
It was caught using dolphin-friendly methods so these graceful, exuberant creatures, and other sealife, were safe. It was fished in waters where tuna stocks weren’t in danger so unlike the purchase of cod, plaice and numerous others fish, your tuna butty was not encouraging yet more High Seas destruction.
But all is not well on the tuna front either, a Greenpeace report has found. For every 10 kilos of tuna caught for the company John West, for example, one kilo is bycatch. That’s turtles, sharks and even the sublime albatross to you and me.
Until now, we shoppers had assumed that the message ‘dolphin-friendly’ on tins of tuna meant the fishing methods used kept all non-target wildlife safe.
This is not true and the Greenpeace report damns two fishing methods particularly – purse seine nets which encircle schools of fish and everything else with them, and aggregation devices – where fish and other species collect under floating objects.
Add to this, long-line fishing where 10,000 baited hooks are attached to 80-mile lines floating on the sea’s surface and you have an albatross massacre that has put 18 of the 22 albatross species in jeopardy.
Greenpeace says labels must be more explicit and must detail the fishing methods suppliers have used.
The RSPB agrees. Better labelling and better regulation of tuna fisheries is essential to turn tuna fishing into a sustainable operation. If it is not, our albatrosses, turtles and sharks will disappear and so will our favourite lunchtime snack.
Read about the RSPB's Save the Albatross Campaign here
And the Times report on tuna here