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Bluefin tuna in trouble; statistics dismal again
By JOHN GEISER
CORRESPONDENT
The once-great western Atlantic bluefin tuna fishery is in real trouble with no signs of help in sight.
The National Marine Fisheries Service issued a report Dec. 31 on landings of large medium and giant bluefin tuna, and they are dismal for the fourth year in a row.
The service counted only 1,008 fish from all categories — commercial and recreational — with an average weight of 422.9 pounds and a gross weight of 193.6 metric tons.
This was down from 1,024 fish with an average weight of 462.4 pounds and a gross weight of 214.8 tons last year. This is against a U.S. quota of 1,391.2 metric tons for both years.
Fisheries analysts and industry spokesmen regard the landings as a fisheries disaster yet European and African nations keep fishing as relentlessly as they ever did. The Japanese market continues to accept every fish that anyone can supply.
Scientists have expressed their concern at ICCAT meetings, and will do so again at a meeting of that body's standing committee on research and statistics to be held in Madrid, Spain, in June.
Alan D. Risenhoover, director of the National Marine Fisheries Service's office of sustainable fisheries, said the service will hold an informal bluefin tuna scientific workshop to discuss research and preparations for stock assessments at 10 a.m. Feb. 5 through 12:30 p.m. Feb. 6 at the service's Southeast Regional office, 263 13th Ave., South, St. Petersburg, Fla.
Fifteen years ago, Dr. David Bramhall, a charter boat captain at the time and owner of the Mimi VI out Point Pleasant Beach, said the only way to save the bluefin tuna was to have it listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITIES).
A CITIES listing would ban international trade in the species throughout the world.
Bramhall, now a college professor, had fished for bluefin tuna for more than 25 years, and was in the forefront of efforts to save the recreational tuna fishery. He was among those who testified at the first NMFS public hearing on tuna conservation held in Asbury Park.
His testimony was ignored, of course. The domestic and Canadian seiners and the Japanese longliners intensified their efforts, Japan's insatiable appetite for bluefin drove tuna prices from five cents to $5 a pound and higher, and the slide in the stocks intensified.
The Japanese and some domestic fishermen focused on the giant breeding bluefins in the 1970s in the Gulf of Mexico, European and African fishermen stepped up their pressure on tuna migrating from west to east across the Atlantic, and the stocks became even more depressed.
NMFS responded with its first strategy for any falling stocks shared by both U.S. recreational and commercial interests: cut down recreational landings. They did so to such an extent that they killed the charter boat business for bluefin tuna.
Most charter captains tried to shift their emphasis to striped bass, bluefish, blackfish and other species inshore or they split their time between the canyon and inshore fisheries. Tuna were practically forgotten.
The loss of the bluefin opportunity also affected the make-up of the charter fleet. Gradually most full-time captains were forced out of the business, and were replaced by part-time owners or those with other sources of income.
Bramhall was one of those who saw the handwriting on the wall, and changed professions.
"Bluefin tuna fishing as we knew it is over," he said. "It will never come back the way this fishery is being managed under ICCAT (International Commission for Conservation of Atlantic Tunas)."
Bramhall found early that fighting domestic and international commercial interests and the U.S. and foreign governments to save the recreational fishery was futile. Neither science nor common sense would prevail then and the swamp is worse today.
ICCAT is a microcosm of the United Nations — long on rhetoric, mismanagement, corruption and ineffectiveness and short on results.
Bramhall caught on early: "The only answer for bluefin tuna is CITIES."
He recognized that this risked a shutdown of the domestic bluefin tuna market, and probably a ban on recreational tuna fishing, but he saw no other answer to the international problem.
The outlook for the fishery is grim, and the way things are going it appears that there could be a CITIES listing for the species in 2010.
Meanwhile, the bluefin tuna fishery for giants and mediums off North Carolina is good, and boats are docking regularly with some fish of this size as well as some fish between 100 and 200 pounds.
The landings are small, however, and will neither impact U.S. figures to any extent nor affect the overall status of the western Atlantic stocks.
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