Islands Business - Pacific bluefin tuna are going the same way as their Atlantic cousins

LONDON, England ---- The world’s most expensive bluefin: this is a headline we haven’t seen the last of. Prices will keep on going up as the fish career towards extinction in the face of an inability to control fishing fleets. While prices will continue to go up, the weights per fish will go down — 230kg seems big until you compare it with the monster landed off Nova Scotia in 1976 that weighed nearly three times that. Pacific bluefin tuna are distinct from their Atlantic cousins, but the same trends are evident: the proportion of juvenile fish being caught is on the up. In 2008, a study of Mediterranean-caught bluefin in Japanese markets found that a third were juveniles. The World Wildlife Fund warns that there will be no more spawning bluefin in the Mediterranean in three years’ time. A lack of management in the Pacific will seal the fate of the region’s bluefin as surely as the failed efforts at regulation in the Atlantic. Not all Japan’s fishmongers are panicking. Some are speculating instead. According to the tuna market analyst Roberto Bregazzi, Japan has already stockpiled 47,000 tonnes of bluefin tuna for a time when commercial extinction has driven their price through the roof. Another response to the dwindling stocks has been to try to farm the fish instead of relying on wild stocks. After all, it’s easier to guard a cage than it is to police the open ocean. But the huge ocean-going carnivores are not suited to captivity and don’t breed easily. The lack of their usual 6,000 mile migration – or their 60 mph bursts of speed – might be a factor. Although some companies claim to have cracked the problem of fertilisation (by speargunning hormones into them one by one, among other techniques), most opt for ‘ranching’ instead, catching juveniles and fattening them up in cages. Unfortunately, ranching in the Mediterranean has given unscrupulous operators a way to launder illegally-caught fish and so escape regulation. Once wild stocks are gone, the ranches are finished. All is not necessarily lost for the bluefin tuna. Monaco has put forward a proposal to ban international trade in the fish through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. If Japan rejects that, it faces a future free of its favourite delicacy.