Bluefin and You

Caring will get you in trouble. It guarantees heart break, tears, and a conscious seining in the sea of emotion. Often painful, it is no wonder many have given up on it after experiencing one too many tragedies. Like many man-made tragedies, greed often propels the misfortune. And such is the case of the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna.

In March of last year the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITEC) met in Qatar and voted not to place the decimated Atlantic Bluefin Tuna on the endangered species list. Commercial extinction of the species has already occurred with stocks in Brazil, USA, Canada and the North Sea, and the Mediterranean stock, 85 per cent depleted and the last commercial vestige of the species, seems tied to the same sinker.

Eighty per cent of the commercially caught bluefin tuna is exported to Japan, where the rich dark purple flesh commands a premium as the much sought after maguro sushi. Some of these fish have auctioned at over $200,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market.

According to Matt Rigney, author of In Pursuit of Giants, Japan informed the world prior to the Qatar meeting that they would ignore any CITEC restriction on the species.

In March of this year the Obama administration rejected placing the fish on the endangered species list. According to Sen. Snowe (R., Maine) “Such a listing would have unilaterally penalized US fisherman.”

But the jobs issue might be deceptive.

“The number of jobs lost in sports and commercial fishing alone on the eastern seaboard of the United States because of the collapse of our bluefin tuna population in the 1980’s is just one indication of the costs of bad fisheries management,” said Rigney. “…it represents both the loss of income to tens of thousands of fisherman and hundreds of local communities, as well as the radical concentration of wealth in the hands of a few – to the tune of 16.4 billion between 1998 and 2008.”

A primordial law of ecology is that everything is connected. Whether the flapping wings of a butterfly in Africa can cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico is up for grabs but a school of tuna eating mackerel is very much part of food chain balance. This week in Science magazine 24 scientists from 6 countries warned of the consequences we face as the planets top predators are eliminated. The report suggests that the dramatic decline of wolves and lions, sharks and tuna may be one of the most destructive human influences on the natural world.

“Apex consumers… have powerful effects on the ways ecosystems work, and the loss of these large animals has widespread implications,” said Professor James Estes of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Tropic cascade or the impact on plants and animals lower in the food chain was evidenced when urchin-eating sea otter declined in population along the Pacific Coast in the 1990’s. In turn the kelp forests, one of the most dynamic and productive ecosystem on the planet, shriveled as the kelp-eating urchin population exploded.

When wolves were eliminated from Yellowstone Park, elk in large herds overgrazed the sensitive woodland environment. Wolves are now being reintroduced there.

The wolf is no longer a factor in Texas. The last reported Canus Lupis was shot at Castolon in the Big Bend National Park on a cold January day in 1957. However, the elusive Mountain Lion, another apex predator, has survived despite an open season on the animal in our Lone Star State.

The bluefin is a majestic fish that can swim at bursts up to 60 mph, through water that is seven hundred times denser than air. It grows up to eleven feet long, weighing 1000 pounds and can leap out of the water twenty feet and dive to 3000 feet to catch its prey. It crosses the Atlantic in ten days and spawns every spring in the Gulf of Mexico.

A pre-BP Oil Spill estimate of the Atlantic Bluefin population administered by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna suggested 5 million exist from fingerlings the size of a thumbnail to breeding age fish. That’s 1600 humans to every Atlantic Bluefin. In west Texas there’s 1600 flies to every human. So why should we care about a fish in the sea?

Maybe we shouldn’t, there’s pain in caring.