Honey I shrunk the bluefins!
I hope people aren't turned off by the title this time. :moon:
I was looking for something shocking, catchy, compelling, that would draw people into researching what I and more experienced anglers have known for years...that the great bluefin tuna that many of us grew up reading about, are rapidly dwindling in size.
How did this happen?
Whose fault is it?
It's those damn Japanese, isn't it?? :argue:
We should keelhaul the bastids and make them walk the plank!
What right do they have to decimate our fish!
How selfish!
Who do they think they are anyway?
The reality, the straight dope!
I think it's been a combination of factors. We all look for a scapegoat when something bad is happening. We want to point that finger, and hang someone out to dry.
Surely that will solve our problem, or at least make us feel better about it.
That's part of the American agenda, look for the scapegoat, our reality based TV shows are full of that premise.
How about we look inward and blame ourselves, at least partially, for not minding the store? http://stripersandanglers.com/Forum/...cons/icon3.gif
I'm going to try to paint a small picture for you people out there. What I'm doing here isn't unique, it's all been said and done before.
One small twist: I have an agenda. :eek:
My agenda is to try to show people through examples in the tuna fishing, and tuna industry, how the decreasing size of giant bluefins was a mistake could have been prevented.
In much the same way, I will try to show people out there how our Federal Fisheries Management practices for Striped bass have led to similar mistakes that could have been prevented.
If I can do that, and confess in the beginning that I have this agenda, I'm hoping enough people will join me for awhile in this thread to get a few more people out there to look at things differently.
If I can get just one more person to think about things and investigate these issues independently, I will have succeeded at my mission to help educate people, one at a time. :thumbsup:
Historical background of giant tuna fishing
If people really want to get an overview rather than just listening to me, I strongly encourage you to go out and buy this book. Or look for it at your local library. Find some way to read it, it's invaluable for understanding how things can be ignored until it's too late.
Tuna
A Love Story, by Richard Ellis.
Published by Random House, and available here:
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/d...3&view=excerpt
Here's an exerpt which I'll use for illustrative purposes. My hope also is that some of you will be intrigued enough to go out and buy this book. :thumbsup:
**********************
SPORT FISHING FOR TUNA
Around 1496, Wynkyn de Worde, one of the first printers in England,printed the Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle, which was basedon even earlier treatises on “fysshynge.” Izaak Walton published The Compleat Angler in 1653, inspiring a vast number of his fellow Englishmen to take up fishing. But no matter how much they enjoyed the sport, they still ate the fish they caught. Since Walton’s day, however, the art and science of fishing often took precedence over the number and size of the catch that the fisherman brought home to feed his family. Thus did salmon and trout fishing–particularly in England–develop into pastimes suitable for gentlemen, along the lines of fox hunting or bird shooting. The conquest of a fox or a pheasant might require a certain degree of skill and courage, but for the most part, what were needed were a few dogs, a proper kit, and privacy and space enough to engage in these patrician pursuits.
.... But because some fish were so large and so powerful that their capture required more than a little skill (and often a lot of expensive equipment, sometimes including a big boat), the idea of big-game fishing was born.
...This new sport was dashing, daring–and expensive. And for those who could afford it, there was a need of a base suitable to the tastes of the elite.” The idea of catching fish that you had no intention of eating–fishing for sport, in other words–is a very recent development, and probably to some extent based on the great billfishes. They certainly are edible, but fight takes precedence over fillets, and the idea of eating a thousand pounds of fish might be a little daunting to any but the most intrepid (or hungry) angler.
In Van Campen Heilner’s 1953 history of saltwater fishing, we learn:
The first sportsman to test the quality of Nova Scotia tuna... was Thomas Pattilo, a schoolmaster, who tackled them from a dory in Liverpool harbor in 1871....
On Pattilo’s second attempt–presumably with the same gear-he brought to gaff a six-hundred-pound bluefin. In 1908, Commander J. K. L. Ross came to Cape Breton Island in pursuit of these monster mackerel, and although he managed to hook twenty-two of them during the season, he lost every one. The following year, he hooked one that towed him all over the harbor for nineteen hours before “the exhausted sportsman admitted defeat and cut his line.”
Sailors and fishermen who found themselves off the coast of Seabright, New Jersey, in the early decades of the twentieth century were aware that there were some large fish there. They just couldn’t figure out how to catch them. Heilner, who fished there between 1912 and 1916 (with Zane Grey, among others), wrote:
We fished off Seabright out of bank skiffs, sitting on camp chairs, and we gave those giant horse-mackerel some of the finest collection of hooks and lines you ever saw.We could hook them, and that was about all. The rest was fun for the horse-mackerel . . . They looked as big as hogsheads there under the sterns of our dories and some of them ran over a thousand pounds. I saw a fish there one day so big it scared me. I was afraid to put a bait over for fear he’d take it. :scared:
On September 13, 1915, wearing a primitive harness, Jake Werthheim hauled in the first New York Bight “horse mackerel,” a monster of 286 pounds. Seven years later, Christian Feigenspan landed a 407-pounder, and that American record stood until Francis Low boated a 705-pounder in 1933.
The big fish then seemed to disappear from New Jersey waters.
According to Al Anderson’s history of the tuna fishery, fishing for giants off New Jersey did not resume until the 1980s.
Captain Al Ristori caught a 1,022-pound fish in 1980 that held the New Jersey record for a little more than a year, when Roy Parsons landed one that weighed eight and one-half pounds more.
The current American record holder is Jim Dempsey, who reeled in a fish of 1,140 pounds off Galilee, Rhode Island, in 1981.
Zane Grey, considered the most macho of big-game fishermen– Grey admired the tuna so much that his writing approximated the fury and excitement of a tuna feeding frenzy.
With Captain L. D. Mitchell, an Englishman who worked in the fishing tackle department of Abercrombie and Fitch in New York, Grey headed for Nova Scotia in 1924.
Near Liverpool, with Mitchell accompanying him in a twenty-foot skiff, he hooked a bluefin and fought it for five hours: “The tuna heaved to the surface, he rolled and gasped, lunged out his huge head with jaws wide and black eyes staring– a paralyzing sight for me. Then he wagged toward to the bow, his wide back round and large as a barrel, out of the water.” Mitchell called it the “gamest tuna I ever saw or heard of.” Brought to the dock, it measured 8 feet 4 inches in length, 6 feet 2 inches in girth, and weighed 684 pounds. In the prose for which he was famous, Grey described the vanquished fish:
He was built like a colossal steel projectile, with a deep dark blue color on the back, shading to an exquisite abalone opal hue toward the under side, which was silver white. He blazed like the shield of Achilles. From the edge of his gill cover to the tip of his nose was two feet. He had eyes as large as saucers. His gaping mouth was huge enough to take in a bucket. His teeth were like a strip of sand paper, very fine and small. The massive roundness of his head, the hugeness of his body, fascinated me and made me marvel at the speed he had been capable of. What incalculable power in that wide tail! I had to back away to several rods’ distance before I could appreciate the full immensity of him.
Later, Grey hooked another Nova Scotia monster, and described the chase in prose that could have come straight out of Riders of the Purple Sage: “Blue Island seemed a mountain, green on top, black at the sea line, a bleak jagged precipitous shore against which the great swells burst ponderously. The white spray shot high. I saw the green swells rise out of the calm sea and move in majestic regularity to crash and boom into white seething ruin . . . The feeling of the sea under me was something at the moment to take heed of. If I had not been hooked to what must be a gigantic tuna, I would have grown panic-stricken.” This time his brother R.C. and his son Romer were along, and Romer cried out, “Must be a whopper! Don’t work too hard, dad. Don’t let him get away. Don’t give him any rest.” The “whopper” weighed 758 pounds, and Grey rightfully claimed the world’s record for bluefin tuna. As he described it:
I was struck dumb by the bulk and beauty of that tuna. My eyes were glued to his noble proportions and his transforming colors. He was dying and the hues of a tuna change most and are most beautiful at that time. He was shield-shaped, very full and round, and high and long. His back glowed a deep dark purple; his side gleamed like mother-of-pearl in a lustrous light; his belly shone a silver white. The little yellow rudders on his tail moved from side to side, pathetic and reproachful reminders to me of the life and spirit that was passing. If it were possible for a man to fall in love with a fish, that was what happened to me. I hung over him, spellbound and incredulous.
Grey was not only among the first to write about tuna fishing, he was among the first to capture these great-hearted fish.
Another trailblazer was Michael Lerner (1891-1978), a successful businessman who turned an early and avid interest in hunting and fishing into a mature scientific avocation....Michael and Helen Lerner visited the island of Bimini in the 1930s, and by 1936 they had founded the Bahamas Marlin and Tuna Club, with Ernest Hemingway as the first president.
Lerner was also among the first anglers to seek out the giant tuna of Nova Scotia, pioneering the rod-and-reel fishery for giant tuna there in 1935. In eleven days in September 1935, he caught eleven that ranged from 86 to 450 pounds. He was also the principal organizer of the International Game Fish Association (IGFA), which held its first meeting at the American Museum of Natural History on June 7, 1939.
Fishing off Long Island (New York) in the 1920s, Lerner caught a seventy-pound bluefin, and was so impressed with its brawn that he was prepared to devote a good part of his life to the pursuit of big, powerful fishes–including Thunnus thynnus.
In the early thirties, Heilner had set up a primitive fishing camp on the island of Bimini, less than a hundred miles east of Miami, and invited Mike and Helen Lerner to join him. (The Lerners would eventually build a house there, which was subsequently turned into the Lerner Marine Laboratory.) In 1935, Lerner’s tuna fishing off Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, was successful beyond all expectations; in eight days he caught twenty-three fish that weighed a total of 5,536 pounds. :wow: :bigeyes:
60 minutes: the race to catch the last bluefin tuna
Purse seine fishing for bluefin.http://stripersandanglers.com/Forum/...ons/icon13.gif
http://rawstory.com/rawreplay/2008/0...-bluefin-tuna/
"The fishermen insist they are catching smaller fish and lesser fish than in previous years."
"Illegal fishing for tuna is rampant"
What does that tell you?
bluefin tuna at risk of collapse
Bluefin tuna at 'risk of collapse' without drastic action.
Posted Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:00:01 GMT by Martin Leggett
The economics of supply and demand don't work in favor of endangered species, it would seem. A new report into the conservation status of tuna and billfish shows that the most endangered fish are the most high-valued - and the only way to prevent a total collapse is to close those fisheries down. The study is being published in Science today, and comes ahead of the third joint meeting of the Tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations, being held in California next week.
Tuna, which belong to the scombrid family of fishes - also including mackerel and bonitos - are some of the top predatory fish in the oceans, together with billfish such as swordfish and marlin. But many species of both groups are teetering on the edge of catastrophe, because of overfishing - driven in part by rising prices for ever scarcer fish.
This report is the first to assess the extinction risks of all 61 scombrid and billfish species, using the criteria for the Red List of Threatened Species. It is part of an effort by the IUCN to get 20,000 marine species assessed for inclusion on the Red List. This list helps conservationists worldwide to plan their work, telling them which species are most at risk of vanishing; but marine creatures have often been left out of assessments in the past.
According to this new study, 5 of 8 tuna species are so threatened as to make it onto the list - plus three billfish species, the Blue, White and Striped Marlin. But it is the Bluefin tuna which is closest to the edge of the precipice, according to Dr Kent Carpenter, from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and one of the paper's authors.
'All three bluefin tuna species are susceptible to collapse under continued excessive fishing pressure. The Southern Bluefin has already essentially crashed, with little hope of recovery. If no changes are made to current fishing practices, the western Atlantic Bluefin stocks are at risk of collapse as they are showing little sign that the population is rebuilding following a significant reduction in the 1970s.'
Part of the problem is that these large predators grow and reproduce slowly. Recovery is therefore a long-term game of patience and forbearance. Whilst temporary fisheries closure is seen as the best hope for Southern and Atlantic Bluefin tuna, in practice this could simply cause a greater loss, as illegal fishing takes over. So the IUCN sees closure as part of program with a wider, longer reach.
'Temporarily shutting down tuna fisheries would only be a part of a much needed recovery program. In order to prevent illegal fishing, strong deterrents need to be implemented,' said Jean-Christophe Vie, Deputy Director, at the IUCN. 'This new study shows that there is an urgent need for effective management. Scientific findings should not be discarded in order to maintain short-term profit. Marine life and jobs for future generations are both at stake.'
Re: bluefins get revenge!
Tuna stocks shrinking due to sushi consumption -
Christiana Amanpour did this expose - said in the last 30-40 years tuna stocks are down 70-80%.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/around-t...223930976.html
Re: Honey I shrunk the bluefins!
