Coastal Conservation Association (CCA)

A Passing of Giants?
Without sweeping and immediate conservation efforts, the age of the giant bluefin tuna may just fade away.

By Charles A. Witek
TIDE
Jul/Aug 2008

I first laid eyes on a bluefin tuna up in Provincetown, Massachusetts, back when I was 6 years old. Walking on the wharf with my parents, looking at the boats, I froze when we came across the Inca. She was a big, black, wooden sportfisherman with outriggers and tower, just returned to the harbor. Lying on her deck were two huge fish. They were sleek and silver, and filled the entire cockpit. My father said that they were tuna, and in my youthful but fish-obsessed mind, I made myself the promise that I would catch one some day.

That was in August of 1960, when giant bluefin tuna swarmed in Cape Cod Bay and elsewhere throughout the northeast. The fish caught by anglers were weighed, photographed and dumped out at sea, if the local landfill didn't get them. There was no real commercial fishery. The few fish purchased, when someone would take them, were sold for pet food at maybe a dime per pound.

In the late 1970s, I finally got my first shot at a bluefin. I had chartered the Snappa out of Galilee, Rhode Island, for a shark trip, but on the way out we saw bait shower, and then...Volkswagens with fins was the first description that came to mind. Immense fish flew out of the water in their pursuit of the bait, then crashed down in huge eruptions of spray. They were giant bluefin, the same fish I had seen years before lying dead on the Inca's deck, but the life in their bodies made all the difference.

We weren't prepared to take on a giant, but did what we could, putting out lures on our sturdiest rods, 60- and 100-pound line, 6/0 and 9/0 reels. I was standing next to the heaviest rod, wearing no harness and only a light fighting belt when the fiberglass outrigger dipped toward the water, the clip snapped open and the rod bowed over toward the striking fish.

I'll admit to the trepidation in my mind as I reached for the rod, and to great disappointment, as before I could quite reach it, the rod straightened and the fish went free.

It was our only strike of the day.

400 POUNDS TO 40

By that time, Japanese buyers had discovered American bluefin and a brisk export market had developed. Prices soared, with individual fish suddenly worth thousands of dollars. Anglers became de facto commercial fishermen, as tons of tuna were airfreighted overseas.

The legitimate commercial fishery also grew, and participants did quite well as bluefin remained abundant off Montauk, Rhode Island, Cape Cod and points north, although they didn't quite teem in abundance the way they had two decades before. Managers were expressing concern, and the first, halting attempt at regulating the fishery was made.

The next year, I was again on board the Snappa, this time with giants firmly in my sights. In the fighting chair, strapped into a 130-pound rod and 16/0 reel, I started wondering what I had gotten myself into when the captain checked the fit of my harness by taking a firm grip on the rod tip and lifting his feet up off the deck. But I needn't have worried. There weren't so many bluefin off Rhode Island that year, and none picked up my bait.

I finally landed a bluefin in the summer of 1980, but only because I had suspended the hunt for the giant of my childhood dreams. Instead, three of us hired the boat for a school bluefin trip, targeting fish that weighed 40 pounds instead of 400. Trolling southeast of Block Island, on a dark and wind-whipped sea, we landed our limit of four fish apiece, and released more besides. In all my trips since, action has never been the same.

EARLY MANAGEMENT

After decades of declining abundance, which saw bluefin abandon areas that had long supported viable and often heavily-prosecuted fisheries, it didn’t take a biologist to recognize that the species was in trouble and that some significant changes in management were needed.

However, the biological, economic and political aspects of management were, individually and in the aggregate, so intricate and far-reaching that today, 40 years after the management efforts began, we are little closer to reaching a solution than we were when problems first surfaced. The bluefin population has suffered terribly in the interim.

The fact that bluefin can and do traverse entire ocean basins makes it impossible for any nation to adequately manage them on its own. As early as 1954, Frank J. Mather, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, began tagging immature “school” bluefin off New England and the upper mid-Atlantic. His work quickly drew attention after a number of the tagged fish were recaptured off France and Spain. A few years later, researchers confirmed that adult fish also made ocean-crossing journeys when giants tagged in Bahamian waters were recaptured off Norway. One fish made the 5,000 mile crossing in only 50 days.

In 1969, to address the need for international management of tuna and similar (i.e., highly migratory) species, a group of nations entered into the treaty which created the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT).

ICCAT offered the promise of an organization capable of transcending national boundaries and managing fish populations across entire ocean basins. Unfortunately, ICCAT has never lived up to that promise and, too often, seems more concerned with allocating harvest and protecting the commercial fishing interests of each treaty nation, rather than with adopting and enforcing meaningful conservation measures. Such protectionist efforts can encourage blatant, even defiant, noncompliance with ICCAT-approved management measures.

The problem was summed up well by Bob Hayes, CCA’s General Counsel and the United States’ Recreational Commissioner to ICCAT, who noted, “The essential problem is the ICCAT member countries, which are more than willing to apply broad sanctions on countries that are not parties to the convention, and are also more than willing to ignore violations of the members.”

EAST-WEST PROBLEMS

Scientific uncertainty regarding the structure of the bluefin population also hinders the adoption of effective conservation measures. While current research strongly suggests that there are two distinct spawning stocks of bluefin, it also suggests that the current ICCAT practice of managing those stocks, as if they did not mix and remained on their respective sides of a line drawn through the ocean at 45 degrees west longitude, is badly flawed.

It appears that bluefin tuna, particularly the adolescent fish that U.S. regulations deem “school,” “large school,” and “small medium” bluefin, frequently cross the Atlantic. Once bluefin mature, though, data from electronic archival tags indicates that they demonstrate “natal fidelity,” reproducing in the same area where they were spawned. There is no record of an adult bluefin visiting both the Mediterranean and Gulf of Mexico spawning areas.

Furthermore, genetic research has revealed distinctions between eastern and western-stock fish, something that would not occur were there any significant mixing during the spawn. However, adult western-stock bluefin often feed in the northeastern Atlantic, where they become vulnerable to harvest under regulations crafted for the eastern stock.

That causes problems, because the eastern stock of bluefin is about 10 times the size of the western stock, and far higher harvest levels are permitted. Furthermore, eastern-stock bluefin are usually mature by the age of 5 when they are about 52 inches long, as compared to those of the western stock which may take 10 or more years to reach maturity at a length in excess of 80 inches. Regulations designed to protect immature eastern-stock fish from harvest offer little protection to adolescents from the west.

“A COMPLETE FAILURE”

Until recently, it was difficult to quantify the number of fish from either stock that crossed the Atlantic. Conventional tagging data indicated that about 23 percent of the fish tagged in the western Atlantic are recaptured in the east, while about 10 percent of those tagged in the eastern Atlantic are recaptured off North America. However, tagging location is not synonymous with stock of origin, and many of the fish tagged in the western Atlantic could be eastern fish that had not yet returned to the Mediterranean to spawn.

In 2004, a scientific paper authored by J. R. Rooker of Texas A&M University and D. H. Secor of the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory offered a new approach to the origin question. Realizing that the chemical composition of seawater differs from place to place, the researchers investigated whether the chemical composition of otoliths (“ear bones” found within the heads of fish) could be used to determine where a bluefin was spawned. After analyzing otolith content of a number of chemical markers, they discovered that an isotope of oxygen, oxygen 18, is a reliable determinant of an individual bluefin’s origin. Their findings suggest that a lot of what we are catching in the west may have been spawned in the east.

That is not unreasonable. Since the eastern stock is 10 times the size of the western stock, and 10 percent of the eastern stock is believed to cross into western waters, under normal conditions the number of eastern stock fish swimming off North America should be just about equal to the total number of western-stock fish.

A 2007 ICCAT summary stated that “evidence is accumulating which indicates that both the productivity of western Atlantic bluefin and western Atlantic bluefin fisheries are linked to the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean stock. One plausible explanation for the failure of the fishery in the west to take its [Total Allowable Catch] in recent years is that it is partially dependent on fish of eastern origin, and the population of eastern origin fish has been less available to the west.”

Today, after an ineffective rebuilding plan that Bob Hayes calls “a complete failure,” the western stock has reached, and perhaps passed beyond, the brink of collapse. In addition, Hayes notes “for the eastern stock, catches may have exceeded the scientific advice by about 400 percent for at least the last four years.”

As a result, the overfished eastern stock can no longer supply western waters with the number of tuna that it once provided. Very few bluefin now swim off U.S. shores.

MORATORIUM

At last November’s ICCAT meeting, hoping to reverse the bluefin’s decline, the United States and Canada joined together to call for a 3- to 5-year moratorium on harvest in the eastern Atlantic. The proposal failed in the face of strong opposition by Japan and the tuna-fishing states of Mediterranean Europe and Africa.

Despite such failure, it is clear that efforts to protect the bluefin population cannot be abandoned and that this is a time for decisive action. For that reason, Coastal Conservation Association has requested that the U.S. delegation to ICCAT demand that the commission reduce harvest quotas to the level recommended by its scientific staff, and require all member nations to adopt such quotas by emergency action. If ICCAT refuses to do so, CCA believes that the only alternative is a complete closure of the bluefin tuna fishery and a prohibition of all longlining in the bluefin’s spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico.

If conservation efforts succeed, a new generation of anglers might again be humbled by the sight of a pack of bluefin shattering the late summer ocean, then disappearing beneath a churning blanket of foam. But if our efforts fail, there is a too-real chance that, one day, the great fish will survive only in the minds of those of us fortunate enough to have lived in a time of giants, and will be lost forever as we age and fade away.

Charles Witek is the state chairman of CCA New York and a vice-chairman of CCA’s National Government Relations Committee. He served on the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council from 2002-05.