NYT article Tuna's end

June 30, 2010

Tuna's End

By PAUL GREENBERG

In the international waters south of Malta, the Greenpeace vessels Rainbow

Warrior and Arctic Sunrise deployed eight inflatable Zodiacs and skiffs into the

azure surface of the Mediterranean. Protesters aboard donned helmets and took up

DayGlo flags and plywood shields. With the organization's observation helicopter

hovering above, the pilots of the tiny boats hit their throttles, hurtling the

fleet forward to stop what they viewed as an egregious environmental crime. It

was a high-octane updating of a familiar tableau, one that anyone who has

followed Greenpeace's Save the Whales adventures of the last 35 years would have

recognized. But in the waters off Malta there was not a whale to be seen.

What was in the water that day was a congregation of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a

fish that when prepared as sushi is one of the most valuable forms of seafood in

the world. It's also a fish that regularly journeys between America and Europe

and whose two populations, or " stocks, " have both been catastrophically

overexploited. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of only two known

Atlantic bluefin spawning grounds, has only intensified the crisis. By some

estimates, there may be only 9,000 of the most ecologically vital megabreeders

left in the fish's North American stock, enough for the entire population of New

York to have a final bite (or two) of high-grade otoro sushi. The Mediterranean

stock of bluefin, historically a larger population than the North American one,

has declined drastically as well. Indeed, most Mediterranean bluefin fishing

consists of netting or " seining " young wild fish for " outgrowing " on tuna

" ranches. " Which was why the Greenpeace craft had just deployed off Malta: a

French fishing boat was about to legally catch an entire school of tuna, many of

them undoubtedly juveniles.

Oliver Knowles, a 34-year-old Briton who was coordinating the intervention, had

told me a few days earlier via telephone what the strategy was going to be.

" These fishing operations consist of a huge purse-seining vessel and a small

skiff that's quite fast, " Knowles said. A " purse seine " is a type of net used by

industrial fishing fleets, called this because of the way it draws closed around

a school of fish in the manner of an old-fashioned purse cinching up around a

pile of coins. " The skiff takes one end of the net around the tuna and sort of

closes the circle on them, " Knowles explained. " That's the key intervention

point. That's where we have the strong moral mandate. "

But as the Zodiacs approached the French tuna-fishing boat Jean-Marie Christian

VI, confusion engulfed the scene. As anticipated, the French seiner launched its

skiffs and started to draw a net closed around the tuna school. Upon seeing the

Greenpeace Zodiacs zooming in, the captain of the Jean-Marie Christian VI issued

a call. " Mayday! " he shouted over the radio. " Pirate attack! " Other tuna boats

responded to the alert and arrived to help. The Greenpeace activists identified

themselves over the VHF, announcing they were staging a " peaceful action. "

Aboard one Zodiac, Hewetson, a 20-year Greenpeace veteran who in his salad

days as a protester scaled the first BP deepwater oil rigs off Scotland, tried

to direct his pilot toward the net so that he could throw a daisy chain of

sandbags over its floating edge and allow the bluefin to escape. But before

Hewetson could deploy his gear, a French fishing skiff rammed his Zodiac. A

moment later Hewetson was dragged by the leg toward the bow. " At first I thought

I'd been lassoed, " Hewetson later told me from his hospital bed in London. " But

then I looked down. " A fisherman trying to puncture the Zodiac had swung a

three-pronged grappling hook attached to a rope into the boat and snagged

Hewetson clean through his leg between the bone and the calf muscle. (Using the

old language of whale protests, Greenpeace would later report to Agence

France-Presse that Hewetson had been " harpooned. " )

" Ma jambe! Ma jambe! " Hewetson cried out in French, trying to signal to the

fisherman to slack off on the rope. The fisherman, according to Hewetson, first

loosened it and then reconsidered and pulled it tight again. Eventually Hewetson

was able to get enough give in the rope to yank the hook free. Elsewhere,

fishermen armed with gaffs and sticks sank another Zodiac and, according to

Greenpeace's Knowles, fired a flare at the observation helicopter. At a certain

point, the protesters made the decision to break off the engagement. " We have

currently pulled back from the seining fleet, " Knowles e-mailed me shortly

afterward, " to regroup and develop next steps. " Bertrand Wendling, the executive

director of the tuna-fishing cooperative of which the Jean-Marie Christian VI

was a part, called the Greenpeace protest " without doubt an act of provocation "

in which " valuable work tools " were damaged.

But the main damage that took place that day was indisputably to the bluefin.

After the encounter, the fishermen aboard the Jean-Marie Christian VI

transferred the fish alive into a holding cage and slowly towed them away. Soon

those tuna would be brought to feeding pens where they will spend at least

several months putting on weight. Afterward, they will be slaughtered and sent

to Japan, where 80 percent of the world's Atlantic bluefin tuna are eaten with

oblivion.

THERE ARE TWOreasons that a mere fish should have inspired such a high-strung

confrontation reminiscent of Greenpeace's early days as a defender of whales.

The first stems from fish enthusiasts who have for many years recognized the

particular qualities of bluefin tuna — qualities that were they land-based

creatures would establish them indisputably as " wildlife " and not just another

" seafood " we eat without remorse. Not only is the bluefin's dense, distinctly

beefy musculature supremely appropriate for traversing the ocean's breadth, but

the animal also has attributes that make its evolutionary appearance seem almost

deus ex machina, or rather machina ex deo — a machine from God. How else could a

fish develop a sextantlike " pineal window " in the top of its head that

scientists say enables it to navigate over thousands of miles? How else could a

fish develop a propulsion system whereby a whip-thin crescent tail vibrates at

fantastic speeds, shooting the bluefin forward at speeds that can reach 40 miles

an hour? And how else would a fish appear within a mostly coldblooded phylum

that can use its metabolic heat to raise its body temperature far above that of

the surrounding water, allowing it to traverse the frigid seas of the subarctic?

Yes, bluefin tuna are warmblooded.

That bluefin can be huge — 10 feet and more than a thousand pounds — is a side

note. For those of us who have seen their football silhouettes arise and vanish

in less than a blink of an eye or held them alive, their hard-shell skins barely

containing the surging muscle tissue within, they are something bigger than the

space they occupy. All fish change color when they die. But with tuna the death

shift feels more profound. Fresh from the water, their backs pulsing neon blue,

their bellies gleaming silver-pink iridescence, they seem like the ocean itself.

And in a way they are, which explains the second reason bluefin have come to

possess such totemic power. For bluefin tuna and all species of tuna are the

living representation of the very limits of the ocean. Their global decline is a

warning that we just might destroy our last wild food.

In prehistoric times, the hunting of fish began close by, in freshwater rivers

and lakes and coastal ocean waters. But as human populations grew, easily

accessed grounds fell short of demand. By the late Middle Ages, European stocks

of freshwater fish and near-shore ocean species proved insufficient. By then,

Basque and Viking fisherman had already moved on to the continental shelves off

Canada, ushering in the Age of Cod — an age that escalated until the late 20th

century, when some of the largest fishing vessels ever built devastated the

once-two-billion-strong stock of cod on the Canadian Grand Banks. But there were

still new places to fish. In the 1980s and '90s, virgin fishing grounds were

found in the Southern Hemisphere, and supplies of replacement fish like New

Zealand hoki and Chilean sea bass helped seafood supplies keep pace with demand.

But appetites continued to outstrip supply. Global seafood consumption has

increased consistently to the point where we now remove more wild fish and

shellfish from the oceans every year than the weight of the human population of

China. This latest surge has taken us past the Age of Cod and landed us squarely

in the Age of Tuna. Fishing has expanded over the continental shelves into the

international no-man's territory known as the high seas — the ocean territory

that begins outside of national " exclusive economic zones, " or E.E.Z.'s, usually

200 nautical miles out from a country's coast, and continues until it hits the

E.E.Z. of another country. The high seas are owned by no one and governed by

largely feeble multinational agreements. According to the Sea Around Us project

of the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Center, catches from the high

seas have risen by 700 percent in the last half-century, and much of that

increase is tuna. Moreover, because tuna cross so many boundaries, even when

tuna do leave the high seas and tarry in any one nation's territorial waters (as

Atlantic bluefin usually do), they remain under the foggy international

jurisdiction of poorly enforced tuna treaties.

The essentially ownerless nature of tuna has led to the last great wild-fish

gold rush the world may ever see. The most noticeable result of this has been

the decline of the giant Atlantic bluefin tuna. But the Atlantic bluefin is just

a symptom of a metastasizing tuna disease. The United Nations' Food and

Agriculture Organization reports that 7 of the 23 commercially fished tuna

stocksare overfished or depleted. An additional nine stocks are also threatened.

The Pew Environment Group's tuna campaign asserts that " the boats seeking these

tuna are responsible for more hooks and nets in the water than any other

fishery. "

Tuna then are both a real thing and a metaphor. Literally they are one of the

last big public supplies of wild fish left in the world. Metaphorically they are

the terminus of an idea: that the ocean is an endless resource where new fish

can always be found. In the years to come we can treat tuna as a mile marker to

zoom past on our way toward annihilating the wild ocean or as a stop sign that

compels us to turn back and radically reconsider.

" WE FIND OURSELVESin a precarious situation. " So wrote Ritchie Notar, a co-owner

of the internationally acclaimed Nobu restaurant chain, to Greenpeace U.K. back

in 2008 after Greenpeace intensified its tuna-defense efforts and put forward

the idea that bluefin should no longer be served at Nobu's establishments. " We

are dealing with thousands of years of cultural customs, " Notar continued in

correspondence Greenpeace forwarded to me. " The Japanese have relied on tuna and

the bounties of the sea as part of their culture and history for centuries. We

are absolutely appreciative of your goals and efforts within your cause, but it

goes far beyond just saying that we can just take what has now all of a sudden

been declared an `endangered' species off the menu. It has to do with custom,

heritage and behavior. "

Many nations have contributed to the Atlantic bluefin's destruction. Europeans

and North Africans do most of the catching and ranching of the fish in the world

today. The United States continues to allow bluefin fishing in its waters even

though the Gulf of Mexico-spawned stock is considered by many scientists to have

entered into full-scale collapse. But it is Japan, the world's largest bluefin

importer, that has taken perhaps the most aggressive pro-tuna-fishing position,

sometimes assisted by Westerners like Ritchie Notar, who declaim the country's

long tuna-eating tradition. But history shows that Japan's stake in tuna fishing

is recent and, more important, part of the same endgame that has dragged all of

humanity into the Age of Tuna. Before 1800, Japanese tuna sushi didn't even

exist.

Trevor Corson is an East Asia scholar turned popular nonfiction writer and

author of the 2007 book " The Story of Sushi, " and for select groups he will act

as a " sushi concierge, " hosting dinners often at the Jewel Bako Japanese

restaurant in Manhattan's East Village, one of which I attended this past

winter. A Corson-guided meal aims to reveal the historical truth of tuna and to

represent the very different fish that were the staples of sushi in earlier

times. Plate by plate I watched as Corson walked a group of Manhattan

professionals through a traditional Edo-period meal of snappers, jacks and other

white-fleshed, smaller fish that most definitely did not include " red " tuna.

Afterward, Corson sent me an excerpt from a 1999 Japanese anthology titled " Fish

Experts Teach the Secrets of the Deliciousness of Fish " to further underline his

point. " Originally, fish with red flesh were looked down on in Japan as a

low-class food, and white fish were much preferred, " one of the book's

contributors, Michiyo Murata, writes. " Fish with red flesh tended to spoil

quickly and develop a noticeable stench, so in the days before refrigeration the

Japanese aristocracy despised them, and this attitude was adopted by the

citizens of Edo [old Tokyo]. " Other Japanese scholars like the sushi historian

Masuo Yoshino confirm this. Murata, meanwhile, goes on to note that tuna were

introduced into sushi only 170 years ago, when a large catch came into Edo one

season. On that day a local sushi chef marinated a few pieces of tuna in soy

sauce and served it as " nigiri sushi. " The practice caught on. Occasionally a

big bluefin became sushi, but Corson notes these fish were nicknamed shibi —

" four days " — because chefs would bury them for four days to mellow their bloody

taste.

By the 1930s, tuna sushi was commonplace in Japan, but demand could be met by

local supplies of tuna, including the Pacific bluefin species, which dwells in

Japan's coastal waters. It was World War II that took tuna fishing to the next

level. " To recover from the devastation of the war, " Ziro Suzuki, formerly of

the Japanese Far Seas Research Laboratory, wrote me, " Japanese fishermen needed

more tunas to secure food for domestic demand and also to earn more money by

exporting tunas for canning industries in Europe and the U.S. Those needs urged

the expansion of fishing grounds outside of the historic grounds of the western

Pacific. " But this next fishing expansion was technological as well as

territorial. Throughout the postwar period, the Japanese perfected industrial

long-lining, a practice that employs thousands of baited hooks. In the 1970s

Japanese manufacturers developed lightweight, high-strength polymers that were

in turn spun into extensive drift nets that could be many miles long. Though

drift nets were banned in the high seas by the early '90s, in the 1970s hundreds

of miles of them were often deployed in a single night. When drift nets and long

lines were coupled with at-sea freezing technology invented around the same

time, Japanese fishermen were able to fish the farthest reaches of the oceans

while keeping their frozen tuna sushi-ready for as long as a year.

A major yield of all of this Japanese fishing effort was yellowfin tuna. Though

they ate bluefin, Japanese did not hold them in high regard before the 1960s,

and it took a confluence of socioeconomic factors in both Japan and the West to

bring bluefin to the fore. By the late 1960s, sportfishing for giant bluefin

tuna was starting in earnest off Nova Scotia, New England and Long Island. Like

the Japanese at the time, North Americans had little regard for bluefin on the

plate, usually discarding them after capture.

Bluefin sportfishing's rise, however, coincided with Japan's export boom. In the

1960s and '70s, Japanese planes stuffed with electronics unloaded in the U.S.

and returned empty — a huge waste of fuel. But when a Japanese entrepreneur

realized he could buy New England and Canadian bluefin for a song, he started

filling up all those empty cargo holds with tuna. Exposure to beef and other

fatty meats during the U.S. occupation had already drawn the Japanese to

appreciate bluefin's fatty belly (otoro, in sushi terms). The Atlantic bluefin,

the biggest bluefin, became the most favored of all. This appreciation

boomeranged stateside when Americans started to develop their own raw-fish habit

in the late 1970s.

Added to the already significant fishing pressure from the tuna canning

industry, Japan's and now the West's sushi jones has come to stress populations

of large tuna around the world, starting with the most environmentally sensitive

Atlantic bluefin but with the risk of spreading to other species. In fact, one

subpopulation of Atlantic bluefin has already vanished after heavy fishing by

Japanese long-liners: The bluefin that used to congregate off Brazil disappeared

in the early bluefin boom of the 1970s. The remaining Atlantic bluefin stocks

are trending similarly, and the two other species of bluefin — the Pacific,

which ranges between California and Japan, and the southern bluefin, which plies

the waters around Australia — are not far behind. In the United States, the

direct fishing pressure on bluefin continues — but perhaps a larger problem is

that a large quantity of North American bluefin are caught accidentally as

" by-catch " when industrial long-liners deploy their legions of hooks in search

of yellowfin tuna over the bluefin's spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico. By

law, nearly all bluefin caught as by-catch must be dumped back into the sea.

Usually by that point they are already dead.

All of this has led the bluefin to become a cause célèbre among conservation

groups and the target of several organized " save the bluefin " campaigns. None of

them have influenced Japanese consumers. In the case of Nobu, after numerous

exchanges with Greenpeace, the sushi restaurant's owners remained unpersuaded of

the need to stop serving the fish. Their only concession was a haiku-esque

warning on the menus of its London eateries:

" Bluefin tuna

Is an environmentally threatened species

Please ask your server for an alternative. "

Willie Mackenzie of Greenpeace U.K. responded angrily in a note to Ritchie

Notar: " Despite the assurances that you take these issues seriously and that you

want Nobu to be a leader in this field, you have essentially tried to abdicate

responsibility by suggesting that it is down to your customers to decide if they

want to eat an endangered species. "

AWAY FROM RESTAURANT menus and the entree preferences of individual consumers,

more far-ranging choices are presenting themselves to humanity than picking a

California roll or a sliver of otoro. These are choices that will shape the fate

of not just Atlantic bluefin tuna, not just all tunas, but all the great sea

creatures — sharks, swordfish, marlin, even whales. For every one of these

animals is highly migratory and roams the high seas, the vast, ownerless

seascape that makes up some 60 percent of the oceans.

Until the 1970s, fishing in the high seas tended to be based on the principles

of Hugo Grotius's 1609 treatise " Mare Liberum " — a document that advocated free

use of the oceans by all. But in the last 40 years, Grotius's " free sea " has

grown progressively more circumscribed. Today, high-seas and highly migratory

fish are overseen by 18 regional fisheries-management organizations. These

" consensus-oriented " institutions, in which each member nation has equal status,

can be guided more by political horse-trading than by sound science. A former

chairman of the scientific committee of the International Commission for the

Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (or Iccat), the body responsible for Atlantic

bluefin, told me, " Even though scientific advice says you should stick to a

specific catch number, in order to negotiate a deal they tend to nudge that

number over a little bit. " That little nudge can be enough to put a population

of tuna in jeopardy.

In 2008 Iccat set Atlantic bluefin catch limits that were nearly double what its

own scientists recommended. Conservationists howled, and the quotas were reduced

sharply. But by the time Iccat met again, in November 2009, environmentalists

had come to home in on the historic mismanagement of Atlantic bluefin, many of

them arguing that a simple reduction in catch quotas for the coming fishing

season was not enough — that in fact a zero-catch quota was the only thing that

would stave off the fish's extinction. Iccat rejected the zero-quota idea. This

in turn forced a much more high-pitched confrontation this spring between

parties like Japan, which seems to feel that fishery-management problems can be

resolved within the status quo, and those who are looking to take the high seas

in a profoundly different direction.

The debate was joined when delegates gathered this past March in Doha, Qatar,

for a meeting of the United Nations Convention on the International Trade in

Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna, or Cites (pronounced SY-tees). It was a

meeting that, for fish, could have been as important as the 1982 meeting of the

International Whaling Commission that voted to establish a moratorium on

commercial whaling worldwide. For if conservationists got their way, Atlantic

bluefin would be included in the Cites treaty's Appendix One — a result that

would ban the international trade of the tuna and put them under the

jurisdiction of the same U.N. body that oversees tigers, white rhinos and giant

pandas. It would be the beginning of a process that would transition Atlantic

bluefin tuna from seafood to wildlife.

It is precisely this kind of recasting that happened with whales in the 1980s,

and Japan was intent on avoiding a similar recategorization with Atlantic

bluefin tuna. As Masanori Miyahara, the director of the Fisheries Agency of

Japan, put it to me: " Cites Appendix One is too inflexible . . . once a species

is listed in a Cites appendix, it will never be delisted or down-listed as the

history of Cites clearly shows. " In other words, once a fish becomes wildlife,

it will stay wildlife. A Cites treaty would also allow those countries that

happen to have bluefin in their territorial waters to continue to catch them for

their own market while excluding all the other treaty member nations — a result

that Masanori would surely find not only unfair but also capable of leading to

further overfishing. (The European Union has indicated it will continue to catch

its allowable quota even if a Cites resolution is passed.)

Japan's touchiness about fairness on the high seas is understandable given its

dependence on seafood. Its per capita seafood consumption is among the highest

of any industrialized country. And Japan has not been blind to the problems that

come with overfishing and excessively large fishing fleets. Indeed, in the last

few years it has tried to rein in its industrial fishing effort, decommissioning

vessels, literally pulling hooks out of the water. But this has failed to

resolve another problem of the Age of Tuna. Just as the industrialized countries

are starting to realize the need for more sensible management of the high seas,

developing countries are heading in the opposite direction. " Developing

countries firmly believe they have a right to expand their fisheries and that

developed countries should reduce their fishing effort to compensate, " Ziro

Suzuki wrote me. " In the process of trying to resolve the conflict of interest,

the stocks become overfished, and overall fishing effort grows to an

unacceptable level. . . . It's really just another example of the North-South

problem, just like CO2 emissions. "

The conflict between the developing and developed world plays an increasingly

greater role in tuna negotiations, and at a certain point it is hard to figure

out who is manipulating whom in an intrigue involving 175 countries, each trying

to game the system. Representatives from both the WWF and the Pew Environment

Group told me of a curious imbroglio as the Qatar Cites meeting neared its vote

on bluefin. Japanese delegation members supposedly told African representatives

that European bluefin fleets would relocate to the coast of Africa and catch

African yellowfin tuna if the Cites bluefin motion passed. This despite the fact

that European vessels are geared up specifically for bluefin fishing and lack

the capacity to pursue yellowfin. Masanori Miyahara of the Fisheries Agency of

Japan dismissed this claim as " completely wrong and unfounded. We never told

such a thing to anybody. We even haven't thought such an idea, ever. "

True or not, African nations lined up with Japan. After Libya and Sudan forced a

vote, the Atlantic bluefin's Cites Appendix One listing was rejected by a large

majority.

Delegates flew away from Qatar with the status quo in place. The monthlong

bluefin purse-seining season set earlier by Iccat for the Mediterranean would

stand as it was with quotas above what many scientists had recommended. A month

after the Cites meeting, BP's Horizon Deepwater oil rig collapsed into the sea

and spewed oil into the only bluefin spawning ground in the Americas just as the

few remaining North American stock giant bluefin were preparing to mate in the

Gulf of Mexico. Though the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service has been

deeply critical of the Mediterranean bluefin catch — in 2007, it went so far as

to call for a moratorium — it has been noncommittal about the American fishery.

When I asked the Fisheries Service if it would consider closing the bluefin

season on the heels of the BP spill, I was offered a statement, part of which,

recast in verse form, has an almost Nobu-type haiku quality:

" N.O.A.A. Fisheries is carefully monitoring

The spawning of bluefin tuna in the Gulf of Mexico

By collecting larval samples and analyzing reports from scientific observers. "

It seems then that no single nation is ready to commit to a sustainable future

for the fish. Some would argue that extirpation might just have to be the

bluefin's fate. Other, smaller tuna might be better suited to industrial

exploitation. The bigeye and yellowfin tuna generally grow faster and spawn

earlier. And indeed these lesser tuna are already starting to fill in for the

bluefin's absence. In the United States most Americans usuallyend up eating

bigeye when they order otoro — the fatty zebra-striped flesh that fetches the

highest price on most sushi menus nowadays. But major populations of bigeye tuna

are also declining. Should they go away, it's hard to say what would come next.

we get ourselves out of the Age of Tuna with our moral center and our food

supply intact? Can we develop a civilized hunter-gatherer relationship with tuna

and indeed with all other fish and reach a point of equilibrium with our last

wild food? Can the management bodies that have overseen the collapse of the most

magnificent food fish we've ever known be trusted to manage what is left in its

wake?

The answer depends on where you fall on the fairly broad political spectrum of

the world's different tuna watchers. The Fisheries Agency of Japan maintains

that " Japan is committed to ensure the recovery " of the Atlantic bluefin and has

stipulated it will support a complete shutdown of the bluefin fishery at next

fall's Iccat meeting, should the scientific committee recommend it. Greenpeace

meanwhile has punted on the bluefin political process. " Others have failed our

oceans, " Oliver Knowles told the press as he prepared his mini armada off Malta,

" so Greenpeace will act. " Greenpeace is calling for a radical realignment of the

high seas, to take stewardship away from regional fisheries-management

organizations and establish 40 percent of the world's ocean territory as a

marine reserve, a kind of Antarctica-style agreement with shades of whale, where

nations, instead of bargaining over quotas, would simply not be able to do any

fishing at all in large areas of the oceans. Most other environmental

organizations are behind the marine-reserve idea, but they vary in opinion on

how big those reserves should be. The Blue Ocean Institute calls for a five-year

moratorium on Atlantic bluefin fishing everywhere. TheWWF further advocates that

the industrial fishing methods that spread during the Age of Tuna — the drift

nets, long lines, purse seines and spotter planes — be done away with. In their

view, the " artisanal " single-hook-and-line fishing practices of old are the only

way to sustainably hunt big and naturally scarce predators like bluefin.

But if we are to embark on a global project of ramping down tuna fishing, what

are we to eat?

Until the modern era, the response to wild-game decline has been a primitive

one: widespread destruction of the animals that can't stand up to our hunting

followed by the selection of a handful of ones that we can tame. Out of the many

mammals that our forebears ate before the last ice age, humans selected four —

cows, pigs, sheep and goats — to be their principal meats. Out of all the many

birds that darkened the primeval skies, humans chose four — chickens, turkeys,

ducks and geese — to be their poultry.

And indeed, this is a process that is taking shape rapidly with fish. Atlantic

salmon are now commercially extinct throughout almost the entirety of their

range but have become one of the most widely farmed fish in the world.

But while leaps have been made in taming marine fish, tuna, particularly bluefin

tuna, may not make very much sense for the farm. Bluefin ranching as it is

practiced in the Mediterranean, and with the Pacific bluefin in Japan and the

southern bluefin in Australia, rightly faces strong environmental criticisms

since it relies on catching juveniles from the wild and denies those baby

bluefin a chance to reach adulthood and breed. Now, however, the final steps of

fully taming or " closing the life cycle " of bluefin tuna are under way, which

will make it possible for bluefin to be grown from an egg in a laboratory to a

full-size adult. In such a system, an isolated " domestic " family of bluefin can

be established that need not have any interaction with the wild at all. For

several years Japan has been producing small amounts of closed-life-cycle

Pacific bluefin (known as Kindai tuna in the market). In Europe and Australia,

scientists have used light-manipulation technology as well as time-release

hormone implants invented by the Israeli endocrinologist Yonathan Zohar to bring

about the first large-scale captive spawning of Atlantic and southern bluefin.

But there are considerable complications ahead. As Smullen, an

Australia-based feed-company specialist working to come up with a suitable diet

for farmed bluefin, explained: " The thing is the metabolic rate of these fish is

very high compared to other fish; they swim fast, they heat their brains and

vital organs and are warmer than the surrounding water, so this is energetically

expensive. An analogy is like trying to feed an ultramarathon runner — they have

the potential to eat a lot and not put on any weight. " Though Smullen says that

it is possible to bring feed-conversion ratios for bluefin down, currently it

may take 15 pounds of feed to produce a single pound of tuna, roughly 10 times

as much as is needed for farmed salmon.

As fisheries decline globally, more and more countries are trying to replace

their wild fish with farmed ones. Today 30 million tons of small forage fish are

removed from the oceans yearly, with the majority of it going to feed farmed

fish. If we end up farming bluefin on the same scale as we now farm salmon, the

tuna, with its poor feed-conversion rate, may end up taking the food of the

remaining wild fish that we haven't yet got around to catching.

In addition there is little evidence to suggest that taming a species saves its

wild forebear. Tiger farms in China have not halted tiger declines in the wild.

Hundreds of millions of farmed Atlantic salmon have not stanched wild Atlantic

salmon's continued decline. Just because we can tame something doesn't mean we

should. The example of whales again rises. As the science historian D. Graham

Burnett points out in a coming book on the Save the Whales movement,

collaborations between American nuclear scientists and marine biologists were

once proposed in the 1960s whereby tropical atolls, leveled by nuclear testing,

could be used as giant corrals for the commercial farming of cetaceans. But

fortunately for the whale — and I think for us too — we have come to see the

whale not as something we fish for, not as something we farm, but as something

we appreciate and maybe empathize with. Instead of expanding our stomachs or our

wallets, whales have expanded our consciousness, our very humanity. So we have

to ask ourselves, is there any rational argument for humans to eat bluefin tuna,

wild, ranched or farmed? Is the fish really so special that no substitute will

do? If the Japanese adapted to a higher-fat diet in half a century, could they

and all sushi lovers not shift gears again and adapt to a sustainable diet?

It was in answer to these questions that I went looking for a farmed fish that

could satisfy tuna-eaters at the sushi bar. A fish that had the dense " bite " of

tuna but with a smaller ecological footprint — a Volkswagen instead of a Hummer.

My search led me to the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, where I motored with

a tall, optimistic Australian named Neil Sims. As we donned wetsuits,

fins and scuba tanks, Sims rejoiced in telling me tales of his adopted land.

Eventually we spat in our masks, adjusted our regulators and dived into the

water above Sims's farm — a huge underwater ziggurat that is the center of his

company, Kona Blue Water Farms.

Until recently, most of the fish we've chosen to domesticate have been

accidents. Salmon, striped bass, trout — we have chosen those species because we

knew them as wild game. We seldom considered their biological profiles or

whether they jibed well with the ecological limitations of a crowded planet.

But Neil Sims was a fisheries biologist before he was a fish farmer. And it was

his direct personal experience with the limitations of fisheries management that

persuaded him that fish farming, done right, was a better choice than fish

catching.

Sims began his career in the remote Cook Islands of the South Pacific. There he

was responsible for managing a giant snail called a trochus that produces an

attractive pearly shell, valuable to native jewelers. Over half a decade, he

implemented numerous management strategies. Nothing worked — not even shortening

the harvest season drastically. The day after one season ended, he came across a

bare-chested Polynesian elder who had pulled his dugout canoe onto the beach.

Sims looked inside the boat and saw it filled with trochus.

" I yelled at him, " Sims remembers. " Then he yelled at me. He started to cry.

Then I started to cry, and then the old bugger finally says: `Why? Why did you

close the season? There are still some left!' " This moment prompted him to look

beyond fishing, to an entirely different approach.

Sims was drawn to Hawaii, with its deep near-shore waters and strong currents —

attributes favorable to aquaculture that he believed could make ocean farming

sustainable. But the fish farming he found on arrival in Hawaii didn't impress

him. " People were trying milkfish and mullet, " Sims recalled. " They start with

the letter `m' and they're all really kind of hmmmmm in the mouth, if you know

what I mean. " Sims found the fish too bony and small, with loose, mushy flesh.

This was important. Sims's long-standing beat in the South Pacific had persuaded

him that " there was an opportunity for a high-value, sushi-quality fish, " a fish

that could fit into the dense-flesh category that the Age of Tuna had cultivated

in Japan and indeed throughout the developed world.

After parsing many species he came across Seriola rivoliana. Known in Hawaiias

kahala, it is a speedy, firm-fleshed animal of the same family as yellowtail and

amberjack. They are only very distantly related to tuna and do not have tuna's

ruby red color, but they still have dense flesh and could easily pass for white

albacore sushi. The fat content in Sims's farmed kahala is around 30 percent,

and indeed it is the presence of fat that accounts for much of a sushi fish's

tunalike flavor.

Sims was further intrigued when he found that kahala had barely been fished

commercially. In their wild form kahala can carry ciguatera poison — a toxin

sometimes deadly to humans that kahala ingest when they feed around coral reefs.

But when kahala are isolated away from reefs and fed a traditional aquaculture

diet of soy and fishmeal, they are ciguatera-free. (Sims asserts that ciguatera

has never been detected in the flesh of his fish.) Since they have not been

fished commercially, wild kahala populations are large and unlikely to be

severely damaged through interaction with farmed fish. Moreover, kahala are much

more " feed efficient " than tuna. The amount of fish required to produce a pound

of kahala ranges from 1.6 pounds to 2 pounds, an order of magnitude better than

bluefin. And Sims recently began feed trials using diets that contain no

directly harvested forage fish. Lastly, unlike tuna, which require a tremendous

investment in spawning technology, kahala are naturally fecund: they breed

frequently, at least weekly, throughout the year.

THERE ARE, OF COURSE, those who would disagree with Sims's approach. When I

asked Casson Trenor, author of the 2009 book " Sustainable Sushi, " for his

impression of the kahala as a farmed fish, he responded that the farming of any

carnivore is " fighting the current. " " You may have a farm that has a more

efficient protein ratio, " Trenor wrote me, " but produces more waste streams.

Perhaps you have a feed pellet that knocks your feed conversion ratio down to 1

to 1, but you continue to host a rampant parasite infestation. . . . We need to

identify fish that through their physiology and life history actually lend

themselves to clean farming operations. " Trenor's own compromise is to serve

wild " small format " tuna like skipjack or albacore, fish that he feels can

embrace the " principles of seasonality, local awareness and sustainability " that

sushi originally expressed before it was " transformed through cultural

misinterpretation and overzealous globalization into exactly the opposite. "

But as I plunged into the calm blue waters off Kona and inflated my diving vest

to gain equilibrium in the water column, I couldn't help thinking that in a

world of environmental evils prosecuted against fish, the farming of a more

efficient carnivore than a bluefin under the stewardship of a knowledgeable,

environmentally conscious biologist was a good deal better than the rapacious

industrial harvesting of " large format " tuna. Looking down at this " cathedral "

of fish, as Sims called it, the possibility of a certain balance presented

itself. Using technology developed over the last 10 years, Kona Blue has

constructed diamond-shape cages that can be moored in the open ocean away from

sensitive coastal areas. As I glided down, past the fish swimming in unison in

their net pen, I felt a cautious optimism. The site of these pens had been

carefully chosen; the swift currents meant that nutrientsdid not accumulate

below the pens. And regular monitoring has found the fish to have no internal

parasites, unlike the wild kahala. Sims's commitment to transparency is also

encouraging. He regularly posts water-quality reports on his Web site and

presumably will do the same as the operation expands.

Sims waved me over to the side of the net pen. I floated above him, close enough

to see that the fish actually seemed to recognize him. In what he would later

describe to me as the " rock-star effect, " the fish crowded to be close to him.

Sims spread his arms out wide and seemed to take in their adulation.

Sims has trademarked his kahala with the name Kona Kampachi — " Kona " for its

point of origin, " Kampachi " for the similaranimal in Japan. They retail for $18

to $20 a pound in fillet form and to date have a tenuous foot in the market.

Production reached more than a million pounds in 2008, about a third of the

amount of bluefin caught in American waters that year. After a hiatus during

most of 2009 and the first part of 2010 while Sims reconfigured his cages, the

product will be reintroduced this July with even more capacity. Kona Kampachi

may not have the rich ruby color of tuna (a color that is often enhanced

artificially by " gassing " with carbon monoxide), but it is an extremely pleasant

sushi experience. It satisfies the sashimi yen that has been created over the

last 30 years — the yen for the firm, energy-rich musculature of a fast-swimming

open-ocean fish.

Can we embrace a new set of species that we don't know intimately in their wild

form? Can we come to an understanding of which fish work for us as " seafood " and

which fish don't? I would hope so. The survival of the wild ocean could very

well depend on it. I took one more look at Neil Sims floating with arms

outstretched, his kahala finning in the current, each one mutely appraising this

conductor of a silent concert. The only sound was the whir of bubbles rising by

my ears.

SEAFOOD. HOW MANY species suffer those two mean English syllables? Other

languages are no kinder. Romance European cultures use the expression " sea

fruit, " while Slavs say " sea gifts. " So-called vegetarians rue the killing of

farmed terrestrial animals but regularly eat wild fish. Kosher laws mandating

merciful animal slaughter don't apply to fish.

These thoughts were in my head recently when I got perhaps my last look at a

wild bluefin tuna, just a month before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and

collapsed into the Gulf of Mexico. I was 20-odd miles off the coast of Cape

Hatteras, N.C., aboard the Sensation, a vessel chartered by the Tag-a-Giant

Foundation, a nonprofit organization trying to decode the complex migration

patterns of the bluefin and help lay the scientific foundation for the fish's

protection. Tag-a-Giant had been fishing for a couple days, and many people had

sat in the fighting chair I now occupied, reeling in tuna after tuna. But for me

this was a first. I had never caught a bluefin before.

In the past I would have wanted to savor the fight, to do battle with the fish

with lighter, more " sporting " tackle. But considering everything I'd learned

about tuna, humans and the chances of the great fish's survival, it suddenly

seemed infinitely more appropriate to fight this tuna with the full expression

of humanity's power. For in the end tuna are no match for us. We have in this

final phase of exploitation achieved dominion over the entirety of the watery

world, from inland lakes and rivers to the littoral zone to the continental

shelf out to the abyssof the high seas. Sitting in the huge fighting chair with

the huge rod and reel, in the well of the huge sportfishing vessel, it was

inescapably apparent who had the edge.

As my bluefin breached, one of the scientists opened a door at the stern of the

boat. A blue vinyl mat was laid down on the deck. The fish came through the

door, still " hot, " banging its tail excitedly. But in an instant a biologist

named Andre Boustany placed a moist cover over the tuna's giant eye and a

hydration hose in its mouth. The tuna motor mellowed, and at last the fish was

beatifically still.

" Do you want to tag him? " Boustany asked me.

I took the sharp four-inch needle from his hand and positioned it just behind

the fish's dorsal fin. Pricking the skin slightly I started to pull my hand

away.

" No, " Boustany said, " you gotta really stick it in there. "

Applying more pressure, I felt the needle slide into the flank, felt the

resistance of the dense sushi flesh, raw and red and most certainly delicious.

But for the first time in my life I felt tuna flesh for what it was: a living,

perfect expression of a miraculous adaptation. An adaptation that allows bluefin

to cross oceans at the speed of a battleship. An adaptation that should be

savored in its own right as the most miraculous engine of a most miraculous

animal, not as food.

Perhaps people will never come to feel about a tuna the way they have come to

feel about whales. Whales are, after all, mammals: they have large brains; they

nurse their young and breed slowly. All of that ensconces them in a kind of

empathic cocoon, the warmth of which even the warmest-blooded tuna may never

occupy. But what we can perhaps be persuaded to feel, viscerally, is that

industrial fishing as it is practiced today against the bluefin and indeed

against all the world's great fish, the very tigers and lions of our era, is an

act unbefitting our sentience. An act as pointless, small-minded and

shortsighted as launching a harpoon into the flank of a whale.

Greenberg is a frequent contributor to the magazine. This article is

adapted from his book " Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, " which will

be published next month by Penguin Press.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/27Tuna-t.html

=====

June 30, 2010

Does this affect fish oil? Kate

>

> Tuna's End

> By PAUL GREENBERG

>

> In the international waters south of Malta, the Greenpeace vessels Rainbow