5. Tsukiji Fish Market

The Tsukiji Market in Tokyo is the largest wholesale fish market in the world. More than 2,000 tons of seafood is auctioned off every day between 5 a.m. and 2 p.m. at 1,667 stalls, with over 50,000 fisherman, traders, and restaurant owners participating in the action. The market covers 556 acres mostly occupied with buying and selling stalls, or “pits” as on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). Tsukiji officially opened in 1935. In its first full year of operation, the market handled 183,000 metric tons of seafood valued at ¥45 million, more than $20 million in 1936 dollars or roughly $313 million by today’s standards.¹

The market has its own docks on the Sumida River, which opens into Tokyo Bay, so some of the produce comes straight from the sea. Refrigerated trucks arrive from all over Japan starting at midnight. By 5 a.m., the pallets have been forklifted from the trucks and delivered to the stalls, and almost everything has been arranged in displays that visibly demonstrate the Japanese penchant for design and packaging.

The Tsukiji market is often included on the schedule of tourists, who want to get there before everything is sold. Some of the boxes (there are a lot of Styrofoam boxes here) contain species that even amateurs would recognize. There are fish that look like red snappers; the little skinny ones are probably some kind of sardine (or anchovy); if it looks like an eel, it probably is an eel (Whoa! I didn’t know people ate moray eels); and many more-or-less recognizable varieties of salmon, bass, groupers, jacks, carp, perch, mackerel, and triggerfish (Do people really eat triggerfish?). Even an ichthyologist would be hard-pressed to identify all the kinds of fishes; Japanese ichthyologists often come to Tsukiji to look for new species. There are elongated, silvery fish with tooth-filled mouths; purple fish with big lips; tiny silver things that look as if they belong in a home aquarium; black fish, yellow fish, red fish, blue fish, striped fish, spotted fish, dried fish, smoked fish, salted fish, long fish, short fish, fat fish, skinny fish. There are flatfishes with both eyes on the same side of the head: halibut, flounder, sole, plaice, turbot. A veritable zoo of fishes: sea horses, squirrelfish, cowfish, roosterfish, goatfish, goosefish, rabbitfish, wolffish. And dolphinfish, sailfish, spearfish, swordfish, cutlassfish, scabbardfish. And the deadly fugu, a puffer fish that can kill you if it’s not prepared by a master chef. Not all the fish are dead; many healthy, live fish are swimming in tanks. They will be selected by wholesalers and delivered to restaurants as quickly as possible—freshness being the key. There are trays of carefully packed salmon roe and tuna roe; fishes for sale before they would have been born; and here is the roe of sea urchins (uni), a delicacy that commands a particularly high price.

Other types of marine life and seafood are also traded at the market: clams, mussels, periwinkles, and mollusks in shells that look as if they belong in a shell collector’s cabinet. Tiny squid, little squid, big squid, cooked octopuses, uncooked octopuses, bright-red octopuses, little brown octopuses; cuttlefishes of all sizes and colors; tiny crabs, little crabs, big crabs, giant crabs (the so-called spider crabs of the Bering Sea). Jellyfish, lobster, shrimp, prawns, crayfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, sea anemones, and many varieties of seaweed. If it ever lived in the ocean, it can be found at Tsukiji. And even if it never lived in the ocean—even if it never lived anywhere—it can also be found here. All this seafood does not originate in local waters. Every kind of commercial fishery sends its products to Japan. Tsukiji is the final destination for Scottish and Norwegian salmon, Alaskan pollack and king crab, aquacultured shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico and Thailand, octopus from West Africa and the Mediterranean, and squid from the Japanese distant-water fisheries in the Falkland Islands and Baja California. Minke whales were killed in the Antarctic. The tuna have come from New England and also from ranches in Tunisia, Morocco, Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece, Croatia, Turkey, Mexico, and South Australia.

In the stalls, are tuna of every kind, ranging in size from the little bullet tunas through the larger bonitos, albacore, and skipjack. Most of the fishes are displayed in booths, but the star of the show, the main reason for the tourists, is not to be found in a common booth. The bluefin tuna, known as maguro, will be found only in special rooms—large open spaces the size of a high school gymnasium without the bleachers. Harsh sodium lights glare overhead; the fish here will be examined very carefully. The temperature is kept at a level where the frozen fish will not thaw. Everybody wears a coat and rubber boots, and most of the workers wear hats and gloves. You can see their breath, and you can see a mist rising off the ranks of frozen tuna. (Most of this tuna, which will be marketed as fresh, starts its journey to a restaurant aboard a fishing boat, where it was flash-frozen soon after it was caught.) Potential buyers, identifiable by the yellow plastic government licenses clipped to their baseball caps, walk carefully among the arrangement of frosted, tailless tuna. The removal of the tail fin, which takes place immediately after the fish is caught, makes the fish much easier to handle and ship. Each fish also has a half-moon-shaped hole where the gills used to be; the breathing apparatus decomposes during shipment. The fish are grouped according to size and ocean of origin: the 200-pounders from the Indian Ocean are together, the 500- to 600-pounders from New England or the fish farms of Australia lie side by side, and so on. Each fish has a number on it, and as the buyer examines the fish, he makes notes on a little pad. The auctioneer rings a handbell to signal that his auction is about to begin. He watches the buyers who bid on each fish with subtle hand signals; his singsong calls continue until each fish in the lot is sold.

Originally, the Cape Cod fishermen would bring their harpooned tuna to the dock at Sandwich, Yarmouth, or Barnstable, where a local dealer would pay them by the pound. They got anywhere from $2 to $30 a pound, but a 400-pound tuna at $2 a pound is worth $800, and $12,000 at $30 a pound. Payment varied from fish to fish, and from season to season, but these giant tuna were worth so much money at the dock that the fishermen could afford to pay a spotter pilot $100 for each fish they harpooned. The dealers on the dock would then sell the tuna to Japanese buyers, who paid much more per pound. By the 1992 season, they were selling $18,000 fish to the Japanese. It didn’t take the New Englanders long to realize that they could circumvent part of this multilevel system. They banded together to form a cooperative called Cape Quality Bluefin (CQB) and negotiated their own deals with Japan. For the 1990 season, CQB handled 100,000 pounds of tuna and grossed $2,153,000. At the docks in Massachusetts and Maine, technicians from Tsukiji instruct the fishermen on the proper techniques for handling and packing tuna for export. When some of the CQB fishermen went to Japan to observe the Tsukiji auctions, they saw a 350-pound fish sell for $42,000, or $120 a pound.

Years of experience enable the buyers at Tsukiji to examine the fish with an eye (and nose) toward identifying the richest, reddest meat with the highest fat content. Near the base of what would have been the tail, a slice of flesh has been half-mooned back, revealing the bright red color of the meat. The buyer can cut off a sliver, hold it up to the light, smell it, and taste it. After all, it is precisely the taste and “mouth feel” that determine the quality and price of the maguro. He will also rub the sliver between his thumb and forefinger to test the fat content. The tuna are auctioned one at a time. The auction may appear casual to an outsider, but every hand gesture is recorded, and the auctioneer’s assistant writes down everything. As each fish is sold, it is marked in red with the buyer’s name. Many of the tuna are sold right there to local merchants. The carcass will be delivered, often by handcart, to a booth in the market, where it will be butchered by a man wielding something that looks an awful lot like a samurai sword. The frozen carcasses are sectioned by a man working a table saw. By noon, most everything has been sold. The great number of trucks belonging to wholesalers, fish companies, and restaurants have taken to the streets of Tokyo to begin the final distribution process.

A giant bluefin, hatched from a tiny egg in the Gulf of Mexico, grew to full size in the North Atlantic. It may have crossed the Atlantic several times. Its life was ended by a harpooner out of Barnstable, Massachusetts, and the fish was gutted on the dock, sold to a Japanese buyer, trucked to Logan Airport, and airlifted to Narita in Tokyo. From there it traveled by refrigerated truck to Tsukiji, and with many other frozen tuna carcasses, it was unloaded and taken to the auction sheds so that buyers could ascertain its quality and bid on it. Along the way, it passed through the hands of several distributors, all of whom made a small profit. Cut into small pieces, it was sold to a Tokyo restaurateur, who had it prepared as sashimi. A two-ounce portion will sell for about $75.

Tuna Farming

In a remote bay on the south shore of Nova Scotia, 25 miles west of Halifax, some fishermen conceived the idea of trapping big bluefin tuna in mackerel traps and fattening them for sale. It was originally tried in 1937, but there was no market for what was then known as “horse mackerel,”² so the experiment failed (Butler, 1977). By the mid-1970s, however, the skyrocketing Japanese sashimi market changed everything for the trap fishermen of St. Margaret’s Bay. In 1975, the first impoundment nets (the equivalent of an open-water fish tank with sides of netting) were constructed, about 500 feet across and 50 feet deep. When they arrived, the tuna had just migrated north from their spawning area in the Gulf of Mexico and were emaciated and of little commercial value. So they were fattened on two feedings a day of herring and mackerel culls, squid, and whiting.

At St. Margaret’s, it was Japanese technicians who built the original eight holding pens; even at this early date, the Japanese had recognized the efficacy of shipping bluefin tuna directly to Tokyo. By 1976, the Canadians were shipping 300 frozen bluefins a year to Japan, each one wrapped in protective paper, and packed in ice in an individual wooden “coffin” to keep the temperature as low as possible. They were transported by refrigerated truck to JFK International Airport in New York and then air-freighted to Tokyo. Business was so good that the following year, Janel Fisheries doubled the number of impoundment nets at St. Margaret’s and shipped three-quarters of a million pounds of dressed tuna to Japan at a freight rate of a dollar a pound³ (Butler, 1982). St. Margaret’s Bay fishermen have been selling “farmed” bluefin to Japan since the 1970s. Because the Canadian tuna are fed on mackerel, a very oily fish, the fat content of these fish makes them particularly desirable at the Tokyo auctions. In 1978, only three years after this lucrative business had begun, the large tuna became scarce, and in 1981, only 116 fish were trapped in St. Margaret’s Bay. Janel never closed the operation. The trap net tuna fishery of St. Margaret’s continues to this day, a low-profile precursor of the larger, more intensive, and more efficient tuna ranches of Japan, Australia, and the Mediterranean that have come to dominate the news recently.

Aquaculture—raising food fishes from eggs to edible sizes—is not a sport, but it is not fishing, either. It is raising “domesticated” animals for food, just as pigs, chickens, and cows are raised. Catching wild fish and fattening them in pens is something altogether different. It is not exactly fishing, and it is not exactly mariculture. It is, as it were, another kettle of fish. It is changing everything we thought we knew about fishing, and unfortunately, everything we thought we knew about preserving marine resources for the future.

When a loophole big enough to drive a factory ship through was discovered in the regulations governing Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishing, it could have signaled the extinction of the Mediterranean’s bluefin population within a few years. Although there are strict quotas on the number of fish that can be caught in nets or by harpoons (spadare), no regulations whatsoever are applied to the practice of post-harvesting, which means catching wild tuna and keeping them in pens before they are slaughtered. In 2001 there were post-harvesting “farms” in the waters off Spain, Italy, Malta, and Croatia, accounting for some 11,000 tons of tuna caught, as compared to a total of 24,000 tons caught throughout the Mediterranean by direct fishing. More than 90% of the post-harvested tuna went to Japan, and the appetite of the Japanese for tuna belly meat is insatiable. “If nothing is done,” says Paolo Guglielmi, of the World Wildlife Fund’s Mediterranean Programme Office, “wild bluefin tuna will completely disappear from the Mediterranean, perhaps with no possibility of rebuilding stocks.”⁴

Post-harvesting—now known as tuna ranching—has completely reshaped fishing in the Mediterranean, and the fish are much the worse for it. Not only are the tuna threatened, but the fish caught to feed them while they are in the pens are also being fished to destruction. Almost all the countries that fish for tuna in the Mediterranean are switching over to this “feedlot” technology. In each country, the purse-seine catches have declined, and the total catch has increased. The entire catch of the Croatian tuna fleet (increased from 19 boats in 1999 to 30 in 2000) consists of undersized fish destined for the pens. According to a WWF report, “In the Mediterranean, tuna farming started just a few years ago, but estimated production in 2001 gives an indication of the huge development of this activity in the region. In fact, production in the Mediterranean is likely to make up more than half of the world total and is almost exclusively destined for the Japanese market.” Given the eagerness with which Mediterranean nations sell their fish to Japan, it is not a little surprising to learn that Japan maintains a 35-vessel longline fleet in the western Mediterranean, targeting large, prespawning tuna. Perhaps they believe they can avoid the cost of the middleman. In a further attempt to avoid European markups, Japan has now introduced its own tuna farms, with pens in 18 Mediterranean locations.

Even though post-harvesting is classified as “aquaculture,” the fish are all wild-caught, just as if they had been harpooned or purse-seined. True aquaculture requires that the fish be raised from eggs, not simply moved from one place to another to be fattened. But even though the Australian system (now practiced in the Mediterranean) does not qualify under this strict definition, it still demonstrates all the ills that besiege legitimate aquaculture, such as that practiced with Atlantic salmon, as we shall see. Like salmon, tuna are carnivorous and must be fed large quantities of small fishes, which themselves may be threatened by overcollecting. This kind of “farming” therefore does not relieve commercial fishing pressure—it increases it. Waste from the pens is another problem, as is their location—close enough to shore and urban centers to disrupt and often pollute the littoral zone. And because tuna farming falls between the definition of a fishery and true aquaculture, it is completely unregulated on a world scale.

The first commercial tuna-farming operation in the Mediterranean was in 1979, at Ceuta, Spanish Morocco, across the Strait of Gibraltar from European Spain. Lean tuna were caught in almadrabas—huge fish traps that consist of miles of nets suspended from buoys and anchored to the seafloor—as they tried to leave the Mediterranean after the June and July spawning season. Only 200 tons (only?) were caught, and the product was sold at a premium price to the sashimi market in Japan. With some modifications, what began in Ceuta was the beginning of what would become a major industry throughout the Mediterranean. In the future, tuna fishermen wouldn’t wait to trap the tuna in almadrabas; they would catch the tuna in purse seines and tow them to the fattening pens.

After its rise and fall as the heart of South Australia’s tuna fishery, Port Lincoln is once again at the epicenter of a thriving fishery, this time without fishing rods. The tuna are placed in holding pens about 5 miles off the shores of Boston Bay and are fattened for months on tons of dead pilchard.

The Australian tuna-ranching industry has prospered wildly since its inception in 1991. In 2005, the southern bluefin tuna harvest reached 9,000 tons, the biggest to date. The fishery is worth AUS$280 million a year. There are now 15 southern bluefin tuna ranches in South Australia, located primarily in two areas just east of Port Lincoln: Boston Bay and Rabbit Island. Environmental groups have been lobbying for quotas, arguing that the very stock is threatened. But the tuna-ranching industry claims that a reduction in the catch would put people out of work, and besides, the status of the stock is fine. The total export value of the industry grew from $45 million in 1994 to $252 million in 2001—an increase of 56% in just eight short years.

In 2002, a “new kind of mariculture” was taking place off the Pacific coast of Baja California. Mexican fishermen net young bluefins and tow them to special enclosures in Puerto Escondido, near Ensenada, where the fish are kept in circular pens and fed live sardines three times a day for six to eight months. When they reach a weight of about 190 pounds, they are killed and frozen, mostly to feed Japan’s appetite for fatty tuna. On average, these tuna were sold at roughly $45 per pound. There are now a dozen offshore fish farms in Mexican waters, and North American and Japanese investors are looking to get in on the sashimi bonanza.

The first Mexican farm, off Cedros Island on the Pacific side of the Baja Peninsula, was opened in 1997. It managed to produce only 64 tons of tuna in its first three years of operation. Two more farms were opened in 1998 and 1999, at Salsipuedes and Todos Santos Bay (off Ensenada). Eight more were sighted in Bahia La Paz, just north of the city of the same name. As of 2005, Baja California had 22 tuna ranches, producing more than 5,000 tons of tuna. Over the past few years, Japanese fish buyers have paid tuna farmers more than US$50 million, securing almost the entire harvest. A report by tuna industry expert and market analyst Roberto Mielgo Bregazzi states the following:

Donshui, a subsidiary of [the] Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi, is investing 150 million dollars in building fish farms for tuna in La Paz, Baja California Sur. Mitsubishi, one of the world’s most diversified transnationals, is the world’s largest tuna trader... Mitsubishi is partnering with local entrepreneur Mateo Arjona, in order to invest 18 million dollars building 22 large pens to hold yellowfin tuna ranching near san Juan de la Costa. Waters in the bay of La Paz are considered the best in the world for tuna ranching.⁵

Although the weather and waters in Mexico might be ideal for tuna ranching, no fishing operation is foolproof, and there will always be natural hazards to threaten the fish and fishermen. Weather anomalies such as El Niño and other storms can wreak havoc with a ranching operation, and occasional red tides (algal blooms) can kill all the fish in a pen. In March 2003, a cage full of southern bluefins being towed from the Great Australian Bight to Port Lincoln collapsed. The netting entangled the fish, preventing them from swimming. Because tuna need to keep moving in order to breathe, many of them drowned. Although the Australian Tuna Boat Owners Association said the loss was minimal, other observers put the death toll at close to 5,000 fish. The large quantities of baitfish used to feed the tuna attract sea lions, and sometimes they get into the pens and attack the tuna. In November 2003, an 18-foot-long great white shark got into the tuna pen at Coronado Island (Mexico), and although it was shot numerous times, it refused to die. A study by Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute of San Diego (funded by Chevron) will determine the feasibility of establishing a “tuna ranch” in the Santa Barbara Channel, to be affixed to an old Chevron oil-drilling platform. But the same problems attendant upon “traditional” aquaculture are present in tuna farming. Salmon and tuna are carnivores (more accurately, piscivores) and require smaller fish to eat, so growing these fish in pens requires more, rather than less, fishing in the wild. A number of ecological threats have been shown to derive from penned fish, including concentrated fecal matter and rotting food released into the surrounding waters; genetically altered fish escaping and breeding with wild fish; and, probably most frightening of all, diseases spread from captive fish into the wild population.

On June 7, 2005, the Bush Administration submitted to Congress for consideration the National Offshore Aquaculture Act, which would grant the Secretary of Commerce the authority to issue permits for tuna ranching in federal ocean waters. The bill was introduced by Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska (a state that prohibits aquaculture) and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. If passed, the bill would allow aquaculture (including fish farming) anywhere from 3 to 200 miles off American shores. The Hawaii state legislature has already passed legislation that allows tuna ranching in the waters of the western Hawaiian islands. (Sometimes referred to as the Leeward Islands, the western Hawaiian Islands consist of a chain stretching some 1,300 miles to the west of Kauai, consisting of Nihoa, Necker, French Frigate Shoals, Gardner Pinnacles, Maro Reef, Laysan, Lisianski, Pearl and Hermes Reef, Midway, and Kure Atoll.) But instead of 1,300 miles west of Kauai, the original plan called for the Ahi Nui Tuna Farming Company to catch juvenile bigeye and yellowfin tuna and fatten them in an 18-pen tuna ranch to be developed 2,200 feet from the western shore of the Big Island. (Ahi nui means “big yellowfin tuna” in Hawaiian.) Community opposition resulted in the tuna farm’s being moved 20 miles offshore. With the legislation pending, there are plans to test a tuna ranch off Santa Barbara, California, at the site of the Chevron oil company’s obsolete Platform Grace. This region has already seen its share of ecological disasters. On January 28, 1969, at Unocal’s Platform A, 3 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, a drilling operation resulted in an uncontrolled flow of oil from a deep reservoir through oil-bearing sands. Some 3.2 million gallons (79,000 barrels) were released into the Pacific Ocean. Three days after the spill began, winds and currents drove the oil ashore, contaminating more than 100 miles of shoreline. By the fourth day, it had spread to the Channel Islands of Santa Rosa, Catalina, and Anacapa. Eventually, the spill covered more than 800 square miles and reached all the way to the Mexican border. Marine and terrestrial plants were destroyed; marine mammals, seabirds, fishes, and invertebrates were oil-soaked and killed. Bills were introduced in the California and federal legislatures to create oil-well-free zones. In 1972, the National Marine Sanctuaries Act was passed, leading to the establishment of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary in 1980.

Now the Japanese have entered the tuna-ranching sweepstakes. Japanese ranchers favor smaller tuna because they can compete with fishermen, who get a better price for a smaller fish if they sell them directly at the fish market, rather than selling them to a tuna farmer. Still, the Japanese Fisheries Agency now estimates that of the 21,500 tons of tuna imported in 2005, 90% of the total (19,500 tons) was chikuyuo—ranch-fattened fish. Originally, the idea was that sashimi-quality tuna was supposed to be fresh, but there is no way to ship unfrozen fish from Greece to Japan, so fresh has been replaced by frozen. The fish are transferred from fishing boats or tuna ranches to large freezer ships, known as reefers, which then sail to Japan. The largest of these reefers has a cargo capacity of 4,500 tons. (A portion of the vast number of tuna carcasses seen every day at the Tsukiji market have arrived in reefers from Malta, Vietnam, Panama, or other distant ports.) Also, illegal tuna fisheries around the world (commonly known as IUU for “illegal, unreported, and unregulated”) kill an almost incomprehensible number of the target species, plus countless sharks, seabirds, marine mammals, and other fishes.

The increase in tuna ranches in Mexico and the Mediterranean has put a crimp in the one-time dominance of the Australians. If a surplus of “product” is supplied to Japan from the Mediterranean tuna farms, the market will crash, and the income that supports the heavily capitalized Port Lincoln ranches will disappear. (Attempts are being made to stir up interest in bluefin tuna in the huge—and untapped—Chinese market.) But the greatest threat to the Australian tuna-farming industry is the declining stocks of the tuna themselves. In 1984, quotas were introduced into tuna fishery because the catches were declining dramatically. By 1988, the Australian tuna quota was cut from 14,500 tons to 6,250. When it was discovered that the southern bluefins migrated from Indonesia and western Australia to South Australia, Western Australian fishery was completely curtailed to allow the fish to get to South Australia.

Tuna ranching has become a worldwide industry—and a worldwide threat to the tuna populations. In the Mediterranean, where giant bluefins used to be herded into pens to be killed for local consumption in the mattanza, juvenile tuna are now purse-seined and towed to pens for fattening. Harvesting tuna before they are old enough to breed is a guaranteed path toward population collapse. In June 2006, Greenpeace called for the immediate closure of the Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishery, claiming that the population was on the brink of collapse. The Greenpeace vessel Esperanza observed tuna farms and fisheries around the Balearic Islands, in the waters north of Egypt and south of Turkey, and talked to the captains of the fishing vessels. Greenpeace concluded that “45,000 tons of bluefin tuna may have been caught each year in 2004 and 2005, despite the fact that only 32,000 tons can be caught legally.” The organization found that bluefin tuna fishery was out of control in Europe and that ICCAT was incapable of enforcing regulations on the fishery. The WWF issued a report titled “The Plunder of Bluefin Tuna in the Mediterranean and East Atlantic in 2004 and 2005: Uncovering the Real Story” on June 30, 2006. It called for an immediate closure of the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean tuna fisheries, because fleets from the European Union (EU), particularly France, Libya, and Turkey, “are greatly exceeding their fishing quotas and deliberately failing to report much of their massive catches....” (Unreported catches are slaughtered and processed at sea before being shipped to the lucrative Japanese market.) Roberto Mielgo Bregazzi, author of the WWF report, said, “Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks risk imminent commercial collapse. In the race to catch shrinking tuna stocks, industrial fleets are switching from traditional fishing grounds to the last refuges in the eastern Mediterranean and Libyan waters.”

Inside the harbor at Cartagena, Spain, in September 2006, Greenpeace activists created a symbolic “tuna graveyard” with crosses and a banner saying “R.I.P. Bluefin Tuna 1996–2006,” commemorating the decade during which tuna ranching had been taking place there. The environmental organization called for the immediate closure of the Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishery until it could be properly managed. Greenpeace also requested the adoption of urgent measures, including the establishment of a network of marine reserves to protect 40% of the Mediterranean Sea and regenerate its fish stocks. “Tuna ranches like this one are the cowboys of an industry that is directly responsible for wiping out the bluefin tuna from the Mediterranean Sea,” said Greenpeace Spain’s Sebastián Losada aboard the Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior. “A few greedy commercial interests, subsidized by the EU, are employing pirate fishing fleets and fattening tuna to fatten their own wallets,” said Losada. “They are depriving hundreds of fishermen from trying to make a legitimate living from the bluefin tuna.”

Faced with an imminent crash in Mediterranean tuna populations, ICCAT, at its November 2006 meeting in Dubrovnik, Croatia, adopted a weak EU plan. It included a catch quota of 29,500 tons in 2007 compared to the 15,000 tons recommended by ICCAT’s own scientists. The plan also allowed fishing during the peak spawning season, which is the worst possible decision for a depleted stock. According to a recent WWF report, actual catches of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean are more that 50% over the quota set by ICCAT. This illegal activity has meant that artisanal fishermen are catching 80% less tuna compared to the 1990s. Stocks in the oldest fishing grounds of the Balearic Islands have collapsed, and six farms in Spain closed this year due to lack of tuna. EU fishing fleets are responsible for the bulk of illegal catches of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean.

Countries currently farming tuna, and those considering farming tuna, do so almost exclusively for the Japanese market. Open-water tuna fisheries are in decline, but ranching has been a godsend to the fishermen. Countries now engaged in tuna ranching are Australia, Cape Verde, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Libya, Malta, Mexico, Oman, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, and Turkey. Note that of these 18 countries, half are on (or in) the Mediterranean. (Countries considering tuna ranching include the U.S., Costa Rica, and Malaysia.)

It is interesting—but unsurprising—to note that many international tuna ranching companies are capitalized by Japanese investments or have Japanese citizens as advisors or board members. The Sicilian tuna ranch operated by New Eurofish of Castellemare del Golfo was incorporated by local businessman Guglielmo Maggio and Mitsui & Co., Ltd. of Japan. On the north coast of Bali, southeast Asia’s largest tuna-ranching center is a joint venture between Japanese and Indonesian investors. Malta Fishfarming Ltd. and Melitta Tuna Ltd. are subsidized by Takayama Seafood, which invested US$157,000 in the project in the form of tuna futures.

In Costa Rica, in July 2006, the company Granjas Atuneras de Golfito S.A., established by foreign interests from Spain, Venezuela, and Peru, proposed a yellowfin tuna farm off the Pacific coast at Dulce Gulf. The operators claimed that in addition to raising wild-caught yellowfins, they would be breeding them. The plan was opposed by a consortium of diverse groups, including fishermen, chambers of tourism, the indigenous Guayami community, development associations, businesses, scientists, senators, and conservation organizations. Once the groups began investigating, they found that multiple national laws had been violated and that the proposed project would put the entire ecosystem and economy of the Dulce Gulf at risk.

Tuna farming creates not only ecological problems, but also problems that have to do with the very nature of the fish itself. Until the early 1990s, there was a market in Japan for the prime, very expensive, sashimi-quality meat that came from the wild-caught fat northern and southern bluefins. And there was a secondary market for the lower-quality meat that was served in nonsashimi restaurants and sold in supermarkets. “However,” wrote Miyabe et al. in their 2003 review of Mediterranean tuna farming, “[northern] bluefin and southern bluefin of smaller size that had been accepted only at the lower-quality markets before, now fattened by farming and available in abundance, started to constitute a middle category, filling the gap between the two extremes.”⁶ Farm-fattened fish are now a source of lower-priced toro, which can be sold in sushi bars and supermarkets. A glut of lower-priced tuna meat made open-ocean bluefins even more desirable, which encourages heavier fishing pressure on the pelagic populations. Tuna have the misfortune to be at or near the top of the list of “most popular food fishes,” so it is more than a little painful to realize that bluefin tuna is literally being eaten out of existence. At the dock and in restaurants, prices for these fish rise as their numbers diminish. This might sound like nothing more than a traditional supply-and-demand equation, but the difference between fishing and manufacturing is that once fish are gone, you cannot make any more.

Because the number of wild-caught tuna is declining and the number of ranch-fattened tuna is limited by the fecundity of wild fish (and how many are caught before they can reproduce), it would appear that the only way to continue to appease the insatiable (and discriminating) sashimi god is to figure out a way to breed bluefin tuna in captivity.

Tuna Frenzy

Rumor has it that Tokyo has 7,000 sushi restaurants. They range from simple stalls at the Tsukiji fish market (where toro is too expensive to serve) to elaborate restaurants that appeal to tourists, people on expense accounts, and wealthy Japanese businessmen. New York City has had modest sushi parlors for years, but recently, spectacular Japanese restaurants seem to be opening everywhere. The first of the nouveau japonais restaurants was Nobu, opened in 1994 by restaurateur Drew Nieporent and featuring the culinary creations of Nobu Matsuhisa. Trained in Japan, Matsuhisa opened his first restaurant (called Matsuhisa) on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1987, but his was not traditional Japanese cuisine. The fusion menu blends Japanese dishes with Argentine and Peruvian ingredients and eschews sushi and sashimi. Particularly popular with movie stars, Matsuhisa charges at least $80 per person, and you can easily spend $250 on dinner for two.

There are now Nobu restaurants in London (opened 1997), Las Vegas (1999), Milan (2000), Miami Beach (2001), and Tokyo. Opened in 1998 in the upscale Aoyama district, Nobu Tokyo offers the same “fusion” menu as the other restaurants, with nontraditional dishes such as black cod with miso and squid in light garlic sauce. New York has three Nobus. Although none of them serves unadorned raw fish, all three serve yellowtail (hamachi) and tuna (toro), two of the fish that are farm-raised:

• Yellowtail tartar with caviar: $21

• Toro tartar with caviar: $30

• Yellowtail sashimi with jalapeño: $17

Many new Japanese restaurants do serve sashimi, however, such as Matsuri on West 16th Street in Manhattan. In a spectacular, soaring space decorated with glowing, giant paper lanterns, the menu is typical Japanese, with tempura, teriyaki, grilled fish, and meats, but also a generous selection of sushi and sashimi.

Although other cities claim the title, the centers of haute cuisine in the U.S. are Los Angeles and New York. It is no coincidence that the Japanese chef who is currently the most brilliant star in the restaurant firmament opened his first restaurant in L.A. and followed it with one in New York. Masayoshi Takayama operated Ginza Sushiko in Beverly Hills and in 2004 opened Masa in the new Time-Warner Center at Columbus Circle. With a prix fixe of $350 (excluding tax, tips, and beverages), Masa immediately became the most expensive restaurant in a city known for pricey dining. Lunch or dinner for two can easily exceed $1,000. The toro, Masa’s pièce de résistance, is likely to have been bought at an auction at Tsukiji. But because many of the prime northern bluefins come from New England, it is possible that Masa’s exalted pricing incorporates a toro trip from New England to Japan and back again.

Because wild bluefins can be caught off the coasts of New England, it seems unnecessary to fly New England tuna to Japan and then back to the U.S. Of course, some of the top-quality bluefins caught in the Atlantic are purchased by Japanese buyers and auctioned off at Tsukiji, but many New England bluefins make a much shorter trip: New England waters, Massachusetts dock, New York fish market, New York Japanese restaurant.

The bluefin, of course, is the ne plus ultra of the tuna “industry.” Young bluefins have lighter-colored flesh and are less strongly flavored, but as they grow into adulthood, their flesh turns dark red, and their flavor becomes more pronounced. The bluefin is generally the variety of choice for fresh-tuna connoisseurs. It has more fat, and thus more flavor, than the other varieties. (Even though they are genetically distinct, there is no visible difference between the northern and southern bluefin tuna to sashimi lovers.) At maturity, the flesh is dark red, sometimes even wine-colored, with an appearance very similar to raw beef. (Fresh tuna is usually sold already skinned, because the skin is extremely tough.) Because it is served raw, only the freshest and highest-quality fish is used for sashimi. It is usually served with condiments such as shredded daikon (Japanese radish), gingerroot, wasabi, and soy sauce.

Although tuna are found in all major bodies of water (except the polar seas), the majority of the tuna supply comes from the Pacific Ocean, which accounts for 2.3 million tons, or about 66% of the total world catch. The rest of the commercial tuna sold around the world comes from the Indian Ocean (20.7%), the Atlantic Ocean (12.5%), and the Mediterranean and Black Seas (0.8%). Yuichiro Harada, a senior managing director of the Organization for the Promotion of Responsible Tuna Fisheries (OPRT), set up by Japanese fishermen, reports that the number of tuna fishing boats is decreasing in Japan. Rising fuel costs are forcing financially weak fishing firms out of business. In the meantime, the consumption of tuna is increasing in the U.S., Europe, Taiwan, and China. Americans now consume 100,000 tons of tuna as sashimi a year. Taiwan is a major supplier of bigeye tuna to Japan, with catches by Taiwanese boats accounting for some 20% of Japan’s tuna consumption of about 450,000 tons a year. While skipjack and albacore provide the “light-” or “white-meat” tuna consumed in such great quantities in salads and sandwiches, three species (bluefin, yellowfin, and bigeye) are made of the red meat that is favored for sashimi. And although restaurants often claim that their toro comes from only New England bluefins flown to Japan, red tuna meat is just as likely to come from the southern bluefins of Australia, or “farmed” bluefins from the Mediterranean or Mexico.

Tuna are fished in over 70 countries worldwide and are marketed fresh, frozen, and canned. Only about 1% of tuna comes to the market to be sold fresh. The rest goes to the cannery, because canned tuna is America’s most popular fish. Tuna has been fished from the warm, temperate regions of the Mediterranean, and the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans since ancient times. Depending on the species, weights average from 10 to 600 pounds per fish. The majority of the commercial tuna harvest comes from California. The average annual consumption of tuna in America is 3.6 pounds per person, most of which is canned.

The death of the tuna, of course, is the life of the tuna business, and the life of the tuna business is canned tuna, mostly skipjack and albacore. When the fish are unloaded from the vessel, they are thawed in running water or sprays of water. The fish are then quickly gilled, gutted, headed, and finally frozen. After cutting, the tunas are loaded into trays and taken to the precooker. After precooking and cooling, the cleaners remove the skin from the fish and separate the loins from the skeleton. After cutting the loins into solid pack or chunks, according to their firmness, the last step, canning, is a totally automated process. Canned tuna products are packed in oil, brine, springwater, or sauce. Once the cans are sealed, they are cooked a second time (“retort cooking”) for 2 to 4 hours. After the retort cooking, the cans are cooled, labeled, and finally packed into cardboard boxes for distribution.

From the earliest days of the California tuna industry, when San Diego had the world’s largest tuna fleet, there were canneries close to the docks. Like Monterey, where the fishery was for sardines, San Diego also had a “Cannery Row.” With the increased fishing activity in the far Western Pacific and the closure in the early 1980s of both San Diego tuna canneries, fewer and fewer boats need to come to San Diego. Instead, they are using canneries and getting their repairs and provisions at such places as American Samoa and Puerto Rico. The Chicken of the Sea plant in Los Angeles, the last major tuna cannery in the continental U.S., moved its operations to American Samoa. The original company was founded in 1914 when Frank Van Camp and his son bought the California Tuna Canning Company and changed the name to the Van Camp Seafood Company. In 1963, Van Camp Seafood was purchased by Ralston Purina. When it was purchased in 1997 by the investment group Tri-Union Seafoods, the company name was changed to Chicken of the Sea International. The investment group sold the company in 2000 to Thai Union International, now the sole owner. In 2001, Thai Union closed the Chicken of the Sea cannery in San Pedro (Los Angeles harbor). In American Samoa, the canneries are the largest private employers in the territory.

High labor costs were responsible for the closure of the mainland American tuna canneries. (In American Samoa, U.S. federal tax laws apply, but minimum-wage laws do not.) For the most part, the canneries employ people at less than what would be considered a minimum wage in developed countries. The operations were often relocated to areas closer to the fisheries to avoid the additional costs of shipping tuna around the world. There are canneries in the Philippines, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Fiji, Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Port Lincoln, South Australia.

There are many varieties and grades of canned tuna to choose from. Solid or fancy pack contains large pieces of tuna and is usually albacore. Only albacore tuna may be labeled and sold as “white tuna.” Many pay the higher price for white tuna because it has a milder flavor and lighter color. Flaked tuna is broken apart and used in salads where the tuna is mashed and mixed. You can eat tuna raw, cooked, broiled, smoked, grilled, on a roll, as a burger, as a fishcake, as a dip, in a melt, in a salad, in a sandwich, in a pita, in a potpie, in a casserole, as a sauce (vitello tonnato), in a wrap, with mayonnaise, with noodles, with rice, with olives, with onions, with capers, with relish, with wasabi, with pesto, with soy sauce, with risotto, with fettuccine, with spaghetti, with macaroni, with tarragon, with chickpeas, with cheese, with artichokes, and in combinations that are waiting to be invented.

U.S. processors use either domestic or imported raw (fresh, chilled, or frozen) tuna as raw material to produce different varieties of canned and pouched tuna. It is distinguished by the type of meat (white or light), the packing medium (water or oil), and the form. In the U.S., most canned tuna is available as either “solid” or “chunk.” According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which sets strict definitions for how canned tuna is marketed, the difference between “solid” and “chunk” is as follows: The source of most chunk light meat is skipjack, although other species of tuna can be added. Albacore, which is the only tuna species that can be called “white,” is packed almost exclusively in water in solid form.

The U.S. Tuna Foundation (USTF), a lobbying organization based in Washington, D.C., was established in 1976 to represent the interests of the U.S. canned tuna industry, including the U.S. distant-water fishing fleets and the “big three” canned tuna brands: StarKist, Bumble Bee, and Chicken of the Sea International. On its website, the USTF provides this look at the market for canned tuna in this country:

• Japan and the U.S. are the largest consumers of tuna, using about 36% and 31%, respectively, of the world’s catch.

• Canned tuna is the second most popular seafood product in the U.S. after shrimp.

• In the U.S., Americans eat about one billion pounds of canned or pouched tuna a year. Only coffee and sugar exceed canned tuna in sales per foot of shelf space in the grocery store.

• Of Americans who eat canned tuna, the vast majority—83%—eat it for lunch. In fact, canned tuna is the only regularly consumed seafood at lunch.

• Over one-half of canned tuna (52%) is used in sandwiches. Another 22% is used in salads, 15.5% is used in casseroles/helpers, and 7.5% is used in base dishes.

• Households with children under 18 are about twice as likely to have tuna sandwiches available than households without children.

• Light meat accounts for 75% to 80% of annual domestic canned tuna consumption; albacore or white meat makes up the balance.

• Chunk light meat in water is the most popular form of canned tuna, although a demand remains for oil-packed canned light meat tuna.

Some species, such as yellowfins, albacore, and skipjack, are being removed from the ocean in quantities that would drive less-prolific species toward extinction. The less-numerous southern and northern bluefins have been fished so heavily that they are considered endangered. People are trying to make vegetarians out of captive tuna—a fate worse than, or at least comparable to, death. Look at the North Atlantic, for instance. ICCAT recommendations have been published since the mid-1970s, and the results have been a bonanza for the fishermen and an unmitigated disaster for the fish. As long ago as 1975, the director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, in consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, published a proposal to list the bluefin tuna as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. But the proposal was withdrawn when the Atlantic Tunas Convention Act gave the U.S. authority to implement ICCAT’s management recommendations. Big mistake. For decades, ICCAT recognized two distinct populations of North Atlantic bluefins, the western and the eastern. The western population breeds in the Gulf of Mexico, and the eastern in the Mediterranean, and it was assumed that never the twain shall meet. Wrong again. Tagging experiments showed that the stocks intermingled, so harvesting fish from one stock affects the other. And although the quota for the western Atlantic stock (the Gulf of Mexico breeders) was reduced to 2,700 tons, the quota for the eastern stock was kept at around 50,000 tons. That’s 50,000 tons, not 50,000 tunas. Fifty thousand tons is 10 million pounds, and that’s a lot of tuna to take out of the North Atlantic every year.

Conserving the Tuna

Hundreds of thousands of tons of bluefin tuna—which translates into billions of fish—are caught every year, by fishers in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, the central and southern Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. The tuna of the western North Atlantic were purse-seined intensively in the 1960s for canning, but by the 1970s, commercial fishers targeted larger fish for the Japanese market. In 1981, ICCAT declared the Atlantic bluefin seriously depleted and tried to set a quota “as near to zero as feasible.” Within two years, political pressure by the fishermen’s lobby rejected this idea, and the quota for 1983 was 2,600 metric tons—a far cry from zero. Continued fishing pressure drove the breeding population to an all-time low, and conservation groups began a futile campaign to save the tuna. In 1992, ICCAT halved the western North Atlantic quota, but when the population was found to have “stabilized,” industry lobbyists pounced. ICCAT rescinded the 50% cut and increased the quota again. The spawning population is now at 10% of what it was when ICCAT was formed in 1966, and the 2005 IUCN Red Data Book lists the Western Atlantic bluefin tuna as “Critically Endangered.”

A WWF report published in September 2006 indicates that Armageddon for the Mediterranean tuna is nearly at hand. The report, written by Roberto Mielgo Bregazzi and presented at the Brussels meeting of the European Parliament’s Fishing Committee on September 13, reveals that almost no tuna are left in the western Mediterranean, at one time among the most productive of all tuna-fishing grounds. Bregazzi writes: “Today there is consensus that in a context of sustained increase of fishing and farming overcapacity, all the attempts to achieve a real regional management of this key Mediterranean fish resource have resulted in a complete failure. It is not an overstatement to say that the fishery—itself amongst the oldest in the world—faces a high risk of collapse.”⁷ In the area around the Balearic Islands, the 1995 bluefin tuna catch was more than 14,000 tons; by 2006 the total catch had fallen to 2,270 tons. The tuna farms, which would be filling their pens by September, have managed to achieve only a 75% capacity, and six Spanish tuna ranches have ceased operations. The latest findings support the earlier warnings by WWF that huge illegal catches might portend the decimation of the Mediterranean populations and, inevitably, the collapse of the species. At the 2006 ICCAT meeting in Madrid, having learned that the French tuna fleet had illegally exceeded its quota by more than 3,000 tons, an international consortium of scientists said that the bluefin tuna will be lost forever if no action is taken to restrain the French and other Mediterranean fishers.

The collapse of the tuna stocks is exacerbated by the wholesale quantities of tuna that are not recorded or are not included in a particular nation’s total because they are transferred from fishing boats to reefer freezing vessels and are shipped directly to Japan. This IUU (illegal, unreported, and unregulated) fishing—primarily by French, Libyan, and Turkish fleets—accounted for some 25,000 tons of tuna in 2004 and 47,965 tons in 2005. Aside from stopping and prosecuting IUU fishers, the WWF report calls on ICCAT “to adopt a real long-term recovery plan for the East Atlantic stock of BFT which should include a set of effective management measures... but in the meantime, given the virtual unregulated nature of the fishery and the strong likeliness of a near collapse, WWF calls for the immediate and complete closure of the fishery.” (Emphasis in the original.) Given the ineffectuality (or unwillingness) of ICCAT to control its member nations (not to mention IUU fishers), the closure of the Mediterranean fishery seems highly unlikely. The tuna-ranching operations offered only an interim solution, and not a particularly good one at that. As many tuna were caught for the fattening pens as were caught in the purse-seine fishery. Besides, a significant number died before they reached a saleable size. As long as the Japanese are prepared to pay for sashimi-grade tuna, there will be fishermen to catch them—and the Japanese market shows no signs of abating. If the bluefins of the Mediterranean disappear, where will the sashimi come from?

Tuna ranchers in the Mediterranean, South Australia, and Baja California are capturing half-grown bluefins (the Aussies are capturing half-grown southern bluefins) and towing them in nets to offshore pens. There they are fed and fattened until they are the right size to be killed, frozen, and shipped to Japan. It is becoming clear that tuna farming itself might signal the end of an industry, because the process of scooping up all the tuna leads irrevocably (and obviously) to the end of the fishery.

Although it is usually known as tuna ranching, the capture of tuna and their transfer to fattening pens is certainly another form of fish farming, or aquaculture. But because the procedures differ from most fish-farming operations—most salmon, carp, and tilapia are raised from eggs—tuna farming is usually not included in general discussions of aquaculture. The feeding of captive tuna is perhaps the most serious problem facing ranchers around the world. In the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Outer Bay tank, the bluefin and yellowfin tunas are fed sardines, smelt, squid, and a “gelatin diet,” which consists of gelatin-like cubes infused with vitamin and mineral supplements. This is not feeding for the market, and it is actually better if the tuna do not overeat. Early in the history of the Outer Bay exhibit, tuna in holding tanks were dying of congestive heart failure because they were not getting enough exercise, so they were put on a “low-fat” diet.

According to Bregazzi (2005), “about 45,000 tons of baitfish, secured both locally and overseas, were used in 2000–2001. About 60 tons of southern bluefin tuna were also successfully fed a manufactured pellet. An average-size southern bluefin tuna increases in weight by 10 to 20 kilograms (22 to 44 pounds) during the ranching process,” which usually lasts for 3 to 7 months. In the 1999–2000 season, Australian tuna ranches produced 7,780 tons of ranched SBT, valued at over $2 million. By 2003 the total was 8,308 tons, and the 15 SBT ranchers in Australia were looking forward to a 9,000-ton year. The tuna ranchers of Australia, however, do not foresee a constantly increasing harvest and a concurrent rise in gross income.⁸

As Australia heads for 9,000 tons, European ranches in the Mediterranean will nearly double the Australian production, and Mexico is approaching 4,000 tons. Europe and Mexico will ship 19,000 tons of frozen northern bluefin tuna to Japan, while Australia, the only country farming southern bluefins, will ship 9,000. Because northern bluefins grow larger than their southern counterparts, the shipments from the Mediterranean and Mexico are favored in Japan—another problem for the Aussies. In 2004, the South Australian government shut down the pilchard fishery, the main source of food for the tuna ranches, because too many dolphins were being killed. The $300 million tuna-ranching industry was facing an unprecedented crisis: not enough fish to feed the tuna.

In 1981, when J.H. Ryther wrote “Mariculture, Ocean Ranching, and Other Culture-Based Fisheries,” small-scale culture of marine creatures was considered the only possibility. It was not feasible to contemplate farming anything on a large scale. At that time, Pacific salmon fry were raised in hatcheries and released back into the wild to compensate for the loss of wild salmon whose natural spawning beds had been eliminated by dams and other obstructions. According to Ryther, the worldwide mariculture total for 1975 was 3 million tons, of which the largest proportion was 0.2 million tons of milkfish in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan; 0.1 million tons of salmon raised in nets; and 0.2 million tons of ocean-ranched salmon in the U.S., Japan, and the USSR.⁹ Today, by a substantial margin, China leads the world in aquaculture, and most of the fish farmed in China are carp, used for regional consumption in low-income households. In other parts of the world, farmed tilapia, milkfish, and channel catfish have replaced depleted ocean fish such as cod, hake, haddock, and pollack. The worldwide landings for the “capture fisheries” (those in which wild fish are caught at sea) have leveled off at around 85 to 95 million metric tons per year, with most stocks being recognized as fully fished or overfished. Ten years ago, the figure for aquaculture was 10 million tons, but by 2000, it had nearly tripled (Naylor et al., 2000), and the FAO reported that the total for 2003 was 42.3 million tons. Global aquaculture now accounts for roughly 40% of all fish consumed by humans.

The tremendous increase in fish farming in recent years has been offered as a possible solution to the problems of worldwide overfishing, but aquaculture has its own problems. In some cases, aquaculture be contributing to, rather than solving, the overfishing problem. The species most prominently farmed around the world are carp, salmon, trout, shrimp, tilapia, milkfish, catfish, crayfish, oysters, hybrid striped bass, giant clams, and various shellfish. Of these, shrimp and salmon make up only 5% of the farmed fish by weight, but almost one-fifth by value. Farming is the predominant production method for salmon, and aquaculture accounts for 25% of world shrimp production—a tenfold increase from the mid-1970s.¹⁰

Marguerite Holloway (2002) said that aquaculture is “a $52 billion-a-year global enterprise involving more than 220 species of fish and shellfish that is growing faster than any other food industry.”¹¹ By 2005, the total for world aquaculture production, including aquatic plants, amounted to 60 billion tons.

Each species of farmed fish has its own requirements, and it is impossible to generalize about the benefits or detriments of fish farming as a whole. Carnivorous species, such as salmon and shrimp, require food, which is usually provided in the form of fish meal, made from ground-up fish. The cost of providing food for farmed salmon often exceeds the price that the salmon can command. Moreover, in this case, farming contributes to overfishing, because the small fish—such as Peruvian anchovies—are harvested almost exclusively for fish meal. (Not only fishes eat fish meal, of course; most processed fish meal is fed to chickens and pigs.) To feed the carnivores, fishermen are fishing for fish to feed to fish.

The top 10 seafoods consumed in the U.S., in terms of kilograms per capita, are tuna, shrimp, pollack, salmon, catfish, cod, clams, crab, flatfish, and scallops. Farmed seafood, particularly salmon, shrimp, and catfish, saw an enormous change from 1987 to 2000, with salmon rising 265% during that period. Obviously this huge increase was a function of the exponential increase in salmon farming and, to a lesser extent, the much-publicized health benefits derived from eating salmon. Note that tuna, the most popular seafood in the U.S., is not farmed—at least not in the traditional sense. Bluefins are being ranched, which is not exactly farming, but the fishers of albacore, skipjack, and yellowfin are susceptible to all the ecological variables listed here, with the addition of one more: overfishing.

Wild Atlantic salmon are born in a multitude of rivers in countries with access to the North Atlantic. The far-flung salmon countries include Canada, the U.S., Iceland, Norway, and Russia in the north; the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Baltic countries in the middle of the range; and France and northern Spain on the southern margin. The young salmon leave their freshwater home and migrate thousands of miles to feed in the rich marine environment of the North Atlantic off Greenland and the Faeroes. After a year or more in these feeding grounds, the fish undertake their most impressive return migration to the rivers of their birth, where they spawn and complete the cycle. From time immemorial, the cycle of spawning, ocean feeding, and return migrations went on as if the resource were a permanent feature of the natural world, until the 1950s and 1960s, when developments occurred that began to threaten the fish dramatically. The sea feeding grounds, long a mystery, were located, and international exploitation of the fish began at an alarming rate. New types of gear, such as the nylon monofilament net, were introduced with disastrous results, as unregulated ocean fishing fleets began to devastate the stocks of fish while at sea. By the mid-1970s, up to 2,700 tons of salmon were being taken annually from their ocean feeding grounds, and following this massive loss of stock, salmon numbers began to fall precipitously.

The total weight of farmed salmon in 2002 was 1,084,740,000 tons. Farmed salmon are fed meal and oils from wild-caught fish. Each pound of salmon produced requires at least 3 pounds of wild-caught fish, challenging the presumption that fish farming necessarily reduces commercial fishing pressure. In fact, a net loss of protein in the marine ecosystem as a whole occurs when wild catch is converted into meal for aquaculture consumption. Pens full of salmon produce large amounts of waste—both excrement and unconsumed feed. This may result in water quality conditions (such as high nutrients and low oxygen) that are unfavorable for both farmed fish and the natural ecosystem. It is also suspected that nutrients released from salmon farms stimulate micro-algal blooms, but proof of this is lacking because little research has been done. The densely packed condition in pens promotes disease, a common problem in most salmon farms. Furthermore, there have been documented disease transfers from farmed salmon to wild populations, and the potential effects are serious. Although antibiotics are used to treat some diseases, there are concerns about the effects of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on human health. There has been an emphasis on developing vaccines to prevent specific diseases, which reduces the need for antibiotics.

While populations of North Atlantic wild salmon plummet, more than 100 local populations in the eastern Pacific have disappeared. Salmon are extinct in 40% of the rivers where they once spawned along the North American Pacific coast. The potential for interactions with farmed fish and transmission of disease from farmed to wild salmon are especially threatening in the context of these declines. Governments typically encourage aquaculture because it is viewed as economic development, but this often leads to the intensive, large-scale farming methods most often associated with environmental damage. Because the costs of this damage are not borne by the industry, nor is the value of ecosystem services factored into the cost of production, the industry feels no pressure to operate in environmentally sound ways. The increase in worldwide salmon consumption is coupled not to fishing, but to farming.

Tuna and salmon are both fish that people like to eat, but although farmed salmon sales have skyrocketed in the U.S., there has not been a comparable increase in the sale of “ranched” tuna. (The Japanese obviously have no compunctions about eating tuna fattened in pens, and it doesn’t matter if the pens are in Australia, Mexico, or the Mediterranean.) Farmed salmon filets are available year round, but the bluefin tuna supply is uneven, and the price varies with the season. According to the 2006 WWF report “Costco Wholesale recorded fresh-farmed filet sales of over 14 million kilograms in 2002 while fresh tuna sales were 354,545 kg—2.5% of farmed salmon sales,” albacore and skipjack—the “white-meat” and “light-meat” tunas—overwhelmingly dominate the canned tuna market. However, bluefin and yellowfin tuna are still uncommon menu items, likely to be served in upscale “white tablecloth” restaurants, where signature dishes such as “sesame seared tuna” can command hefty prices. Yellowfin “steaks” are often seen in specialty stores, but even though they are still wholesome, they turn brown quickly and do not sell well. And as much as supermarkets would like to offer some form of fresh tuna, so far it has proven to be more than a little impractical because of the high prices and the variation in pricing that depends on a daily evaluation of the fish coming in. Nevertheless, after Japan and the EU, the U.S. is the third-largest export destination for Mediterranean wild and ranched bluefin tuna. This statistic is based on the increase in high-quality sushi and sashimi restaurants in the northeast, California, and Florida. Now if only we could breed tuna, like cows or pigs....

In his 2005 article “When Will We Tame the Oceans?,” John Marra, a biological oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, wrote that “Fishing in the ocean is no longer sustainable. Worldwide, we have failed to manage the ocean’s fisheries—in a few decades, there may be no fisheries left to manage.” He acknowledged that “fish farming can harm the environment in many ways; indeed, some mariculture operations have caused whole-scale destruction of coastal ecosystems... marine farming can pollute in many ways that are aesthetically, chemically and genetically destructive... crowding in aquaculture enclosures or ponds can easily amplify disease and cause it to spread more quickly than it would in the wild... the mariculture of carnivorous species puts additional pressure on fisheries to provide ever-larger quantities of wild fish for feed, exacerbating the decline of wild fish populations....”¹²

Marra’s recommendation was large-scale domestication of the ocean. Move the mariculture systems farther offshore to the waters of the outer continental shelves, and deploy much larger fish pens (closed-net structures containing as much as 100,000 cubic meters of water), which could be floated below the surface and towed from one destination to another, feeding the fish along the way. Another suggestion concerns “herding” of tuna at sea, based on the inclination of certain tunas to aggregate under an object that is significantly different from their surroundings. This propensity has already been exploited by tuna fishermen in the design and implementation of fish-aggregating devices (FADs). A FAD can be something as simple as a towed log or platform or as innovative as a fire hose directed behind the boat to create a disturbance on the surface.

Marra says that taming the sea will mean the disappearance of commercial fishermen, and “the bulk of the fish we eat will come from more limited varieties. In such a future we will have to accept an ocean with fish that can be cultured, and we will have to accept less freedom of the seas...” The common goal should be to maintain the ocean as a sustainable source of food, both economically and ecologically. As on land, sustainability of the ocean’s food supply for the world’s population means domestication of the seas. It is only a matter of time before fisheries around the world crash. Some of the vanishing species—particularly cod, salmon, and tuna—were once the exemplars of plenitude. If the wild-capture fisheries are in decline—because the target species are in decline—it seems self-evident that the only recourse available to a fish-eating world is mariculture. Farmed fish—all of which is destined for human consumption—for 2004 totaled 50 million tons. Most capture fisheries are operating at full or nearly full capacity, which means that the world total will not go up. As the fisheries decimate the wild populations, the world total is more likely to go down. It is incumbent upon fisheries managers and governments to solve the problems associated with aquaculture and to figure out how to replace the decreasing wild populations with farmed fish for a fish-hungry world.

If there aren’t enough little fish to feed the big fish, we simply must find something else for the big fish to eat. In “Dollars Without Sense,” his prescient discussion of big-money tuna ranching, Canadian environmental biologist John Volpe identified one of the major problems with tuna ranching: It takes 3 kg of wild fish to produce 1 kg of farmed salmon (a 3:1 ratio). For farmed cod the ratio is 5:1. The ratio reaches 20:1 for ranched tuna, in part because tuna are warm-blooded, an energy-intensive physiological state for a cold-water fish. The farms around Port Lincoln alone consume more than 20,000 kg of pilchard, sardine, herring, and anchovy per day. Clearly the consumption of 20 units of edible fish to make one unit of product is no one’s idea of a conservation strategy.

But a “conservation strategy” is probably the furthest thing from the minds (or the business plans) of the Port Lincoln ranchers. It is all about money. (Port Lincoln is said to be home to the highest number of millionaires per capita in the Southern Hemisphere.) It is possible that greed will signal the downfall of the tuna-ranching business. As Mediterranean ranches flood the markets with sashimi-grade tuna, Japanese prices continue to drop, but ranching costs do not.

We all know that Japan is an island nation, poor in natural resources, and greatly dependent on the sea for protein, but that does not logically lead to the conclusion that it should catch every swimming thing and serve it up for sale in the Tsukiji fish market. At one time, Japanese whalers hunted various whale species for food in the nearshore waters of Japan, but this subsistence whaling was replaced by commercial enterprise. It was not until the conclusion of World War II that General Douglas MacArthur reintroduced whaling to Japan as a means of feeding the starving populace. Well into the 1980s, the Japanese continued large-scale whaling, not for food, but for commerce. With an increasing armada of catcher boats and factory ships, they included in their hunting grounds great swaths of the northeastern Pacific and the Antarctic. The early Japanese whalers provided food for the people, but by the middle of the 20th century, hardly anybody ate whale meat. The Japanese whaling industry claimed that it had to remain in business for subsistence reasons. However, the International Whaling Commission’s 1983 implementation of a moratorium on commercial whaling was probably greeted with a sigh of relief by the thousands of Japanese schoolchildren who had been fed the whale meat that nobody else wanted to eat. As of 2006, the Japanese had hijacked the International Whaling Commission so that the fate of the moratorium hung by a thread. It is more than a little likely that commercial whaling will resume in the next couple of years.

The wild codfish is commercially extinct in the western North Atlantic. Although they will probably never be able to replicate the previous abundance, the Norwegians have started a program to farm cod commercially. To date, the program is small enough that the problem of an adequate food supply hasn’t come up. But the Norwegians estimated that they would be harvesting 30,000 tons of farmed cod by 2008, and finding enough fish to feed them will present a very serious challenge. At the Aquaculture Protein Center in Norway, they are experimenting with fish meal made of various combinations of soybeans, corn, rapeseed, sunflower seeds, flaxseeds, and wheat gluten. To date, experimental formulas that have provided the proper nutrients are too expensive. Besides, it has not been satisfactorily demonstrated that a vegetarian fish tastes the same as a carnivorous one. And somehow, a vegetarian diet tends to reduce the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in the flesh. But this shortcoming can probably be met in humans by supplements.

Experiments are under way in Australia to feed farmed tuna on pellets made of vitamin-fortified grain, and these have met with some small success. Some researchers have suggested feeding the fish vegetables until about three weeks before they are killed, and then feed them a more “natural” diet just before they die.

But what can be accomplished in South Australia may not be possible in Croatia, Cyprus, Libya, Tunisia, or Turkey. The Aussies are fishing the main population of southern bluefins. But all those Mediterranean countries are in competition for the breeding stock of northern bluefins, and they might find that environmental safeguards or studies cut into their profits. Some environmental events are beyond the reach of traditional regulatory agencies. When the Israelis bombed Lebanon in July 2006, a power station in Jiyyeh, only 80 feet from the sea, was blown up. Tens of thousands of tons of heavy fuel oil gushed into the eastern Mediterranean, and uncontrolled fires burned the rest of the oil. Early reports estimated the spill at 10,000 tons, but it could have been as much as 35,000 tons—close to the 40,000 tons that spilled into Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989, when the 987-foot-long supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground. This was generally considered the worst oil spill in history. A month after the bombing, the oil began to sink, covering the bottom with a 4-inch-thick blanket of sludge. As the first large “oil spill” in the Mediterranean, the Jiyyeh event will have massive detrimental effects on the marine life of the region—including the bluefin tuna that breed there.

The price commanded by a bluefin tuna makes it possibly the most commercially valuable marine finfish in the world on a per-pound basis. Despite an alphabet soup of regulatory commissions—IATTC, ICCAT, CCSBT, NOAA, NMFS, ATBOA, SARDI, ATRT, UNCLOS—tuna fishing continues unabated, and the wild populations of northern and southern bluefin tuna have been reduced to critical levels. Tuna ranches exacerbate the problem by catching tuna before they breed. But this might be worse for the population than catching large numbers of adults. As the tuna populations continue to fall, the Japanese demand for toro will increase; fewer tuna will mean higher prices, and higher prices will mean intensified fishing. Intensified fishing will, of course, result in fewer tuna. (Of course, all bets would be off if the Japanese somehow relaxed their demand for maguro, but that seems as likely as Americans giving up hamburgers.)

The factors that influence the Japanese market price for bluefins are freshness, fat content, color, and shape. But the fisheries pay no attention to these considerations, and they are governed by regulations that are based only on population estimates. If the highest-quality fish are selected from North American landings for sale in Japan, the overall profit goes up. Tuna fishery is rife with IUU fishers, who ignore quotas, restrictions, boundaries, and any other rules and regulations that might threaten their catch. The Japanese market is only too eager to absorb thousands of tons of bluefin tuna, regardless of where or how it is caught. (Japanese SBT fishermen have contrived to circumvent even their own restrictions, bringing in thousands of tons of illegal tuna every year and then falsifying their records.) It would be good for the tuna and, in the end, good for the consumer if tuna fishing were not practiced in such a remorseless manner. But a modification beneficial to the tuna would entail nothing less than a modification of the fundamentals of human nature, and I don’t see that happening in the near future.

In the Clean Seas annual report for 2006, the Hagen Stehr CEO wrote a manifesto for his tuna-breeding project:

• Worldwide, wild fish resources are diminishing steadily—in some cases, rapidly.

• Worldwide, consumption of seafood is steadily increasing—in many cases, dramatically.

• Catches of tuna are declining again in the Mediterranean due to overfishing, pollutants, and health concerns. Scientists believe the resource is doomed and will collapse in the foreseeable future.

• The Mexican tuna harvest is unreliable because of environmental factors and overfishing. The tonnage harvested is continuing to decline.

• In the Southern Hemisphere, overfishing of the SBT resource is being vigorously addressed by Pacific governments, harvests are being severely restrained, and market prices are being driven up.

Clean Seas Aquaculture Growout Pty. Ltd. is a publicly traded company, founded by Hagen Stehr in 1969 and now owned and managed by the Stehr Group in Port Lincoln. The Australian government provided a grant of $4.1 million to assist in the commercialization of SBT breeding. Clean Seas is so sure of success in breeding southern bluefins that it made a public offering of 18 million shares in the company, according to the October 2005 prospectus. It has already successfully raised captive-bred yellowtail kingfish (Seriola lalandi) and mulloway (Argyrosomus hololepidotus), which are now in significant commercial production. In part, Hagen Stehr’s “Chairman’s Letter” in the prospectus reads as follows:

Over the past 6 years Clean Seas parent, the Stehr Group, has been actively working towards breeding SBT and has made significant advances in several areas including broodstock management, on-shore fish transfer, fish husbandry practices, and the pelletized feeding of juvenile SBT... The next step for Clean Seas is the propagation of our own broodstock facility at Arno Bay. Fertilized SBT eggs to be produced in the new facility will be transferred to our existing hatchery facility for the controlled production of SBT fingerlings by adaptation of proven protocols for the other species being propagated. The directors believe that over the next three years this should lead to the establishment of an exciting and long term commercially viable SBT business.

It appears that investing in Clean Seas would have been a good idea. In October 2006, southern bluefin broodstock were airlifted from their pens to a 3-million-liter (790,000-gallon) tank designed to replicate the optimum conditions for spawning.

Unless tuna can be raised as if they were domesticated animals, the world populations will continue to decline, eventually reaching the point of no return. In November 2006, 14 marine biologists published a major study in the journal Science, in which they said that unless things change dramatically, in 50 years, nothing will be left to fish from the oceans. The study, innocuously called “Impacts of Biodiversity Losses on Ocean Ecosystem Services,” points out that as of 2003, 29% of all ocean fisheries were in a state of collapse. As Ransom Myers and Boris Worm pointed out in 2003, 90% of the big fishes are already gone, and we are fishing on the remaining 10%. Of course, not only fishing has contributed to this sorry state of affairs. Worsening water quality, toxic algal blooms, dead zones, invasive exotic species, and the disappearance of animals and plants that filter pollutants from the water have all played a role. Notice that all these calamities are anthropogenic—caused by man. Homo sapiens is by far the greatest threat to environmental stability (especially if you throw global warming into the mix), but also its only hope. The solution to the problem of overfishing is painfully obvious—don’t fish so heavily—but this is very difficult to implement. If we can’t keep the tuna fishermen from catching all the tuna, it is our responsibility to somehow ensure that the tuna will survive and prosper far from the longlines and nets.

Endnotes

¹ Theodore Bestor’s history of Tsukiji (The Fish Market at the Center of the World).

² Butler, M.J.A. 1977. The trap (mackerel) and impoundment (bluefin) fishery in St. Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia: its development. Col. Vol. Sci. Pap. ICCAT 6(2):237-241.

³ Butler, M.J.A. Plight of the bluefin tuna. National Geographic 162(2):220-39.

⁴ Tudela, S. 2002a. Tuna farming in the Mediterranean: the ‘coup de grace’ to a dwindling population? World Wildlife Fund Mediterranean Program Office, Rome.

⁵ Bregazzi, R.M. 2004. The Tuna Ranching Intelligence Unit—September 2004. Advanced Tuna Ranching Technologies. Madrid.

⁶ Miyabe, N. 2003. Description of the Japanese longline fishery and its fishery statistics in the Mediterranean Sea during recent years. Col. Vol. Sci. Pap. ICCAT 55(1):131-137.

⁷ Bregazzi, R.M. 2006. The Plunder of Bluefin Tuna in the Mediterranean and East Atlantic in 2004 and 2005: Uncovering the Real Story. World Wide Fund for Nature.

⁸ Bregazzi, R.M. 2005. The Tuna Ranching Intelligence Unit—Special November 2005 ICCAT Sevilla-Spain Meeting Edition. Advanced Tuna Ranching Technologies. Madrid.

⁹ Ryther, J.H. 1981. Mariculture, ocean ranching, and other culture-based fisheries. BioScience 31(3):223-230.

¹⁰ Naylor, R.L., R.J. Goldburg, H. Mooney, M.C.M. Beveridge, J. Clay, C. Folke, N. Kautsky, J. Lubchenko, J. Primavera, and M. Williams. 1998. Nature’s subsidies to shrimp and salmon farming. Science 282:883-884.

¹¹ Holloway, M. 2002. Blue revolution [Fish farming]. Discover 23(9):57-63.

¹² Marra, J. 2005. When will we tame the oceans? Nature 436:175-176.