Tom Raftery's Library tagged tuna →  View Popular, Search in Google

Near the end of a 12-day cruise in the Gulf of Mexico to study the habitat of just-hatched Atlantic bluefin tuna, scientist Jim Franks came upon fields of oil sheen as far as he could see.

Mixed with the oil were large amounts of sargassum, the golden brown algae that drifts at the whim of winds and tides and shelters the quarter-inch-long bluefin tuna larvae.

How the young will fare and what will happen to the population of bluefin tuna will affect a wide range of people, including the tuna fishermen of Gloucester, Mass., for whom a single fish can fetch $20,000 or more, and sushi chefs everywhere.

While his research is still incomplete, Franks fears that the gushing BP oil will be trouble for Atlantic bluefin tuna.

Gulf of Mexico Atlantic bluefin tuna tuna bluefin tuna bp sargassum oilspill

Green activists using helicopters, divers and rotten butter yesterday confronted Libyan and Italian fishermen to release hundreds of threatened bluefin tuna which they strongly suspect were illegally caught off the Libyan coast.

sea shepherd tuna bluefin greennumbers libya

Green activists using helicopters, divers and rotten butter yesterday confronted Libyan and Italian fishermen to release hundreds of threatened bluefin tuna which they strongly suspect were illegally caught off the Libyan coast.

sea shepherd tuna bluefin tuna libya

Japan, Canada and scores of developing nations opposed the measure on the grounds that ban would devastate fishing economies - just how devastated will they be when Tuna stocks completely collapse?

tuna cites bluefin tuna endangered species

The US has agreed to back an international ban on trade in critically endangered bluefin tuna, and now the European Union nations will do so as well, with Malta being the only dissenting vote. That still leaves us with Japan, which consumes about 80% of the world's bluefin tuna, saying it won't participate when CITES votes to ban trade next week.

eu us cites tuna bluefin tuna critically endangered japan

In a move which could bode well for the future of endangered, but still being overfished, Atlantic bluefin tuna, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species has backed a proposal to enact a ban on trade in bluefin. Here's what the head of CITES' scientific unit, David Morgan, told Reuters:

In our opinion, the criteria for including the species in appendix 1 are met and international commercial trade in bluefin tuna should be prohibited.

cites bluefin tuna International Trade Ban tuna

"Japan, the world's largest consumer of bluefin tuna, hailed a 40 percent quota cut agreed in Brazil in the hope that it will preempt a complete trade ban, a fisheries official said Monday."

japan tuna bluefin tuna

"TIMES are tough for tuna. The guidance of scientists that advise groups that manage tuna stocks is falling on deaf ears.

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas meets this week in Brazil to set catch limits. ICCAT's scientific advisers have told it that stocks of the giant bluefin tuna are plummeting towards collapse. Catches in 2008 were at three times the ICCAT limit, which is itself more than what its scientific advisers consider sustainable (see "Tigers of the sea")Movie Camera. "It's like the year before the collapse of the northern cod," says Dan Pauly at the University of British Columbia, Canada. In 1992 the Newfoundland cod fishery collapsed. It never recovered."

tuna iccat iotc fisheries collapse yellowfin greennumbers

"The United Nations will consider a ban on international trade of the prized fish due to plummeting numbers in the Atlantic and Mediterranean"

bluefin tuna bluefin tuna overfishing greenmonktv

Measures to protect dwindling stocks of bluefin tuna fish in the Mediterranean have failed to curb illegal fishing practices, leaked papers show.

tuna bluefin tuna bluefin mediterranean tuna stocks greenmonktv

For years, environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) have warned that overfishing could cause bluefin tuna to go the way of dinosaurs and dodos. Now the European Commission says it agrees with that grim assessment. In a compromise that unites Europe's departments of environment and fisheries, the commission lent its support to a proposal that, barring new scientific evidence, would list Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin as an endangered species — and therefore ban its trade — for two years.

tuna bluefin tuna wwf greenpeace overfishing greenmonktv

In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 percent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest -- unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.

fish fishing over-fishing fisheries collapse greenmonktv tuna bluefin tuna

The bluefin tuna faces extinction.

This amazing creature accelerates faster than a sports car and migrates across whole oceans. But it has the misfortune to have exquisite-tasting flesh. Large specimens fetch thousands of dollars for sushi and sashimi. There may not be large specimens around much longer.

The bluefin has been listed as an endangered species for over a decade by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. It is as endangered as the giant panda and the white rhino. But to Europe and America's shame, fishermen in the Eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean are continuing to take twice the number scientists advise and the stock is on the verge of collapse. Records suggest that the size of adult tuna migrating to the Mediterranean is half that of a decade ago, a classic indication of population collapse.

The World Wildlife Fund is now predicting that bluefin spawners will be virtually eradicated by 2012.

tuna bluefin bluefin tuna fish fisheries collapse greenmonktv