Oceans

Oceans: The Bluefin Tuna Could Be on a Path to Extinction

By Bryan Walsh | @bryanrwalsh | November 29, 2010 | +
Fishmongers check the quality of meat on large tuna at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market Jiji Press / AFP / Getty

I didn’t understand just how valuable a bluefin tuna could be until I spent a year in Tokyo. Before Japan, sushi was a California roll with artificial wasabi and too much soy sauce. In Tokyo, I discovered how different a meal could be with fresh fish, expertly prepared by a sushi chef standing sentinel behind his counter. And nothing could beat the meat of a fatty bluefin tuna, or maguro, sitting on a bed of vinegared rice. There’s a reason that last year a single record-breaking bluefin tuna sold for nearly $174,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. And there’s a reason that the bluefin tuna is in danger of being fished out of the oceans, the victim of the globe’s growing love for sushi. (Reach Krista Mahr’s great TIME cover story on the tuna problem from 2009.)

If the bluefin tuna is to be saved from overfishing, the nations of the world are going to have to agree on reasonable limits to the hunting. But there’s no evidence that will happen. Over the weekend the not very accurately named International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) rejected extending any new protection for the dwindling bluefin tuna. Delegates from the 48 member nations voted to reduce the 2011 fishing quota for bluefin tuna by just 4% in the Eastern Atlantic, down to 12,900 tonnes, and in the western Atlantic they declined to shut down fishing in the tuna’s spawning grounds in the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Mexico—despite the unknown impact the BP oil spill might have on the tuna’s nursery. As representatives from the environmental group Oceana pointed out, ICCAT’s “protections” will be little more than a speed bump on the road to extinction:

“This trivial quota reduction for the eastern bluefin tuna stock is a political decision, not a science-based one,” said Maria Jose Cornax, fisheries campaigns manager for Oceana. “Without an industrial fishing closure, it actually encourages illegal fishing and fails to ensure stock recovery. This political outcome is not good for the fish or the fisherman, and will certainly result in further stock depletion.”

“It’s business as usual for the western bluefin tuna stock as well,” said [Oceana chief scientist Dr. Michael] Hirshfield. “A token quota cut here, a call to investigate identification of spawning areas there—nothing has changed. In the meantime, the stock remains at dangerously low levels of abundance.”

It doesn’t matter that bluefin tuna populations have fallen an estimated 80% since 1970, or that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists the species as critically endangered. The fish are simply too valuable on the commercial market—the trade is worth billions, some of that off the books. Nor does it help that 80% of the trade goes to Japan, which isn’t shy about using diplomatic and financial muscle to keep the tuna flowing. (Tokyo helped block an attempt earlier this year to stop the international trade of the bluefin tuna as an endangered species.)

No one was really expecting ICCAT to take a stronger stand—environmentalists like to call the group, which is heavily weighted toward the fishing industry, the “International Conspiracy to Catch All Atlantic Tuna.” But the gap between what the scientists are saying about the state of the tuna and what international regulators are doing is growing by the year. I’d love to tell you how ICAAT came to its decision, but the deliberations and votes of the international body are secrete and closed to the media.

Bluefin tuna are amazing creatures. They’re called the “tigers of the sea,” but they’re even more astonishing, growing to more than half a ton and covering migratory routes that are thousands of miles long, at speeds of up to 43 mph. If they were land animals—if they really were tigers—I wonder if we’d even consider eating them, any more than we catch and eat big cats in the wild. But humans have always had a different attitude towards anything that swims beneath the water—even the word, “seafood,” shows where our priorities lay. If we can’t create strong international institutions that can govern the open spaces of the oceans in a meaningful way—with an eye towards sustainability for a growing planet—we’ll just end up racing for the last of the tuna, or the cod, or the salmon. But that needs to start with a change in our appetite.

More on overfishing and oceans in TIME:

Code Blue—Saving Our Oceans

Photo Essay:

Oceans—Australia’s Deep-Sea Creatures

And check out Sylvia Earle’s great TED talk on saving the oceans:

Related Topics: bluefin tuna, extinction, ICAAT, Japan, oceans, overfishing, Food, Oceans

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    According to a national Vegetarian Resource Group Poll conducted by Harris Interactive, nearly 15 percent of Americans say they never eat fish or seafood.

    The pacific sardine lives along the coasts of North America from Alaska to southern California. Sardines, once a major part of the California fishing industry, are now considered to be “commercially extinct.” Another species classified as “commercially extinct” is the New England haddock. Ecologists have also been concerned about the significant reduction in finfish, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, Lake Erie cisco, and blackfins that inhabit Lakes Huron and Michigan.

    Over 200,000 porpoises are killed every year by fishermen seeking tuna in the Pacific. Sea turtles are similarly killed in Caribbean shrimp operations.

    Half of all fresh water worldwide is used for thirsty livestock. Producing eight ounces of beef requires an unimaginable 25,000 liters of water, or the water necessary for one pound of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.

    Factory farm pollution is the primary source of damage to coastal waters in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Scientists report that over sixty percent of the coastal waters in the United States are moderately to severely degraded from factory farm nutrient pollution. This pollution creates oxygen-depleted dead zones, which are huge areas of ocean devoid of aquatic life.

    The World Conservation Union lists over 1,000 different fish species that are threatened or endangered. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimate, over 60 percent of the world’s fish species are either fully exploited or depleted. Commercial fish populations of cod, hake, haddock, and flounder have fallen by as much as 95 percent in the north Atlantic.

    It makes sense to eat lower on the food chain!

    Nor can fish provide any help in alleviating global hunger. There are signs that the fishing industry (which is quite energy-intensive) has already overfished the oceans in several areas. And fish could never play a major role in the worlds diet anyway: the entire global fish catch of the world, if divided among all the world’s inhabitants would amount to only a few ounces of fish per person per week.

    In an online article appearing in the Guardian on 9/14/2010, entitled “Fish: the forgotten victims on our plate,” Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes:

    “Let’s assume that all this fishing is sustainable, though of course it is not. It would then be reassuring to believe that killing on such a vast scale does not matter, because fish do not feel pain. But the nervous systems of fish are sufficiently similar to those of birds and mammals to suggest that they do.

    “When fish experience something that would cause other animals physical pain, they behave in ways suggestive of pain, and the change in behaviour may last several hours. (It is a myth that fish have short memories.) Fish learn to avoid unpleasant experiences, like electric shocks. And painkillers reduce the symptoms of pain that they would otherwise show.

    “Victoria Braithwaite, a professor of fisheries and biology at Pennsylvania State University, has probably spent more time investigating this issue than any other scientist. Her recent book Do Fish Feel Pain? shows that fish are not only capable of feeling pain, but also are a lot smarter than most people believe. Last year, a scientific panel to the European Union concluded that the preponderance of the evidence indicates that fish do feel pain.

    “Why are fish the forgotten victims on our plate? Is it because they are cold-blooded and covered in scales? Is it because they cannot give voice to their pain? Whatever the explanation, the evidence is now accumulating that commercial fishing inflicts an unimaginable amount of pain and suffering. We need to learn…to find…alternatives to eating them.”

    The American Dietetic Association reports that throughout history, the human race has lived on “vegetarian or near vegetarian diets,” and meat has traditionally been a luxury. Studies show the healthiest human populations on the globe live almost entirely on plant foods–useful data, given our skyrocketing healthcare costs.

    Nathan Pritikin, author of The Pritikin Plan, recommended not more than three ounces of animal protein per day; three ounces per week for his patients who had already suffered a heart attack.

    In A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), author Keith Akers observes:

    “Much has been made over the virtues of chicken and fish in comparison to red meats such as beef and pork. It has been said that eating chicken and fish will aid in the prevention of heart disease, because these meats are relatively lower in fat and contain more unsaturated than saturated fat, thus helping to lower cholesterol levels.

    “Unfortunately, these claims are not supported by the evidence. Studies in which human volunteers switched from diets including beef and eggs, to one including fish and chicken showed that serum cholesterol levels were not appreciably lowered by switching to chicken and fish.

    “And an examination of the nutritional data suggests an explanation: while it is true that chicken and fish contain less fat than beef, it is also true that chicken and fish contain about twice as much cholesterol per calorie as does beef. Indeed, some seafoods (such as crab, shrimp, and lobster) are exceptionally high in cholesterol content.

    “All of these diverse theories have roughly the same dietary implications. Meat is high in cholesterol, saturated fat, and total fat. Plant foods, by contrast, are usually low in saturated fat and total fat, and contain zero cholesterol. Vegetarians have lower levels of serum cholesterol than do meat-eaters, with total vegetarians (vegans) having the lowest levels of all.”

    Obviously, then, the idea of providing the entire world with a Western diet is quite absurd. But what about satisfying today’s demand for meat–which provides only a fraction of the population with a Western-style diet? If the world population triples in the next 100 years, and meat consumption continues, then meat production would have to triple as well. Instead of 3.7 billion acres of cropland and 7.5 billion acres of grazing land, we would require 11.1 billion acres of cropland and 22.5 billion acres of grazing land.

    But this is slightly larger than the total land area of the six inhabited continents! We are desperately short of forests, water and energy already. Even if we resort to extreme methods of population control: abortion, infanticide, genocide, etc…modest increases in the world population during the next generation would make it impossible to maintain current levels of meat consumption.

    On a vegetarian diet, however, the world could easily support a population several times its present size. The world’s cattle alone consume enough to feed over 8.7 billion humans.

    Les Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 10 percent per year, it would free at least 12 million tons of grain for human consumption–or enough to feed 60 million people.

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