All Fished Out

Human greed may spell the end for the magnificent Mediterranean tuna-

by fen montaigne

No more magnificent fish swims the oceans than the giant bluefin tuna, which can grow up to 4m in length, weigh more than 250kg and live for 30 years. It can streak through water at 50kmh and dive to over a kilometre in depth. Warm-blooded, it roams from the Arctic to the tropics. Another extraordinary attribute may prove to be its undoing: its buttery belly meat is considered to make the world’s finest sushi. Over the past decade, a high-tech armada, often guided by spotter planes, has pursued bluefin from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, annually netting tens of thousands of the fish, many of them illegally. The fish are fattened offshore in sea cages before being shot and butchered for the sushi and steak markets in Japan, America and Europe.

Once, giant bluefin migrated by the millions throughout the Atlantic Basin and the Mediterranean Sea. So many have been hauled out of the Mediterranean that the population is in danger of collapse. Meanwhile, European and North African officials have done little to stop the slaughter.

“My big fear is that it may be too late,” said Sergi Tudela, a Spanish ­marine biologist with the World Wildlife Fund. “We are witnessing the same phenomenon happening to giant bluefin tuna that we saw happen with America’s ­ buffalo.”

The decimation of giant bluefin is emblematic of everything that is wrong with global fisheries today: the vastly increased killing power of new fishing technology, the shadowy network of international companies making huge profits from the trade, negligent fisheries management and enforcement, and the in­difference of consumers to the fate of the fish species they buy.

The very act of procreation now puts the giant bluefin at the mercy of the fleets. In the spring and summer, as the water warms, schools of bluefin rise to the surface to spawn. Planing on their sides and exposing their massive silver-coloured flanks, the large females each expel tens of millions of eggs, and the males emit clouds of milt (sperm). From the air, this turmoil of reproduction can be seen from many kilometres away by spotter planes, which call in the fleet.