My brother's article on the plight of the bluefin tuna...

http://www.santacruz.com/News/2009/01/06/Bluefin_Tuna_on_the_Brink

Thanks for sharing this well-written but sad article.

I can't see any hope for the bluefin as long as insanity such as this exists:

Two sushi bar owners paid more than $100,000 for a Japanese bluefin tuna at a Tokyo fish auction Monday, about ten times the average price and the highest in nearly a decade, market officials said.

The 282-pound (128-kilogram) premium tuna caught off the northern coast of Oma fetched 9.63 million yen ($104,700)... about $370 per pound

Thanks Andrew very interesting and very Bland

i believe commercial fishing is going cause the demise of another great resource. nobody seems to want to talk about how the commercial fishing industry has decimated our oceans. they just dont get it. all this mlpa bullsh$t about restricting sport fishing. i think they should either heavily regulate or eliminate commercial fishing. clearly they wont regulate themselves any better than the banking industry.

The problem is that these fish travel through many countries waters and even if we ban the take of these fish in US and Japanese waters, people from third world countries (and Spain, which oddly is a major asshat on the overfishing front) will continue to do what they like.  I suppose we could use CITES to ban the international transport of these species.  It'd be difficult to identify what kind of tuna a vacuum sealed bag of red meat came from though.

Unfortunately, with prices that high, the temptation to poach is very high.  I think that aquaculture is the best way to defuse that situation, provide a legal alternative to keep the price low enough to reduce fishing pressure.  Same thing with the abalone.

most of what I have to say about overfishing and regulation can be summed up below...

 



 


 


 

And overharvested fish can be had by the ton at any sushi market in CA!!!

when it comes to chaning what people eat, they always loose out due to NIMBY and "the oceans are soooo big..." and "I only eat tuna 5 times a year, how can that hurt"  and "I might as well buy it, its already been caught"
 

Actually, sardines and anchovies have a boom-bust cycle in our part of the ocean, which is why the sardine population crashed.  MBA has a poster talking about this, but then at the end it says that it should be a lesson about overfishing.  More like over-reliance on an unreliable resource...