A few months before the tuna commission agreed to cut the western Atlantic bluefin catch quota in half, I had taken World Wildlife Fund vice president Mike Sutton out on the ocean to catch, tag, and release a few large blue sharks. As dawn brightened a mild new summer day we headed southeast from Montauk toward an underwater ridge south of Block Island. In recent days, interesting reports had been trickling in from an area about fifteen miles beyond our destination—sightings of uncommon numbers of young bluefins. We were still running when I first caught a glimpse of what looked like it might be a large flock of shearwaters, barely visible in the hazy early morning air a couple of miles south of us. I turned the wheel ninety degrees off course and we went to investigate.
Our plans for the day immediately changed as we witnessed a scene unlike any I had seen before, or have since. The tuna had moved west, and we had run into them. I wrote an unusually detailed entry in my boat log:
An incredible day with bluefin tuna schools over an area stretching at least five miles. The tuna stayed up all day, blitzing baby butterfish and traveling in huge green-frothing schools that often covered about an acre each, frequently moving at 7 knots. The sound was a rolling roar, like thundering herds on blue prairies. The butterfish glittered like sparse raindrops ahead of the busting schools, jumping in random directions rather than coordinated sprays. In the water the little butterfish seemed disoriented and dispirited, awaiting the onslaughts with nowhere to run, until the thundering herds were amongst them, the rushing tuna completely overwhelming their schooling defense by ripping through them en masse on a broad front. Feeding activity peaked around 5 pm. Also saw 2 white marlin—it’s been a while! Lots of sea horses noticed among floating weeds.
Most of those fish were young four-year-olds from the last moderately strong spawning of bluefin tuna in the western Atlantic, in 1989. This age-group represented a small spike of abundance, hope, and opportunity, preceded and followed by years of generally dismal reproduction in the Gulf of Mexico spawning grounds. They were now about seventy pounds on average, and we saw thousands of them. This was the generation most at stake. We had helped convince the federal government a year earlier to ban the sale of such young fish, and we felt hopeful that this vigorous group of juveniles might be shepherded into adulthood and allowed to spawn new generations. Protection of this year class might make the difference in rebuilding the bluefin population, so it seemed particularly promising that mounting pressure on the tuna commission might finally prompt them to cut the catch quota in half.
When the tuna commission met and indeed agreed to halve the western Atlantic bluefin quota, they left themselves a year before fully implementing the cut. In that time the tuna industry’s flag bearers and lobbyists scrambled like mad dogs, leaning heavily on congressional representatives, bureaucrats, and a variety of scientists.
The scientists found a data error that, when corrected, indicated that the population was down “only” about 85 percent instead of 90 percent or so. Using this skimpy pretext, the East Coast tuna industry was able to turn the politics around again. They shifted their strategy, drawing attention away from their own overfishing by pointing fingers at people overfishing in the Mediterranean. Tagging studies in the 1980s indicated that only about 1 to 2 percent of American bluefins go to Europe every year, but the industry argument was: “Since some of the fish cross the ocean, people in the Mediterranean are catching our fish and they are the problem—and we demand an increase in our quota.” While the logic was not exactly watertight, politically this tack was a winning ploy: No politician or bureaucrat could possibly lose out by criticizing foreigners while working to please their own constituents.
Even though the industry’s own paid scientific consultants showed that rebuilding the bluefin population to levels of the mid-1970s within twenty years would require cutting the West Atlantic quota by about 80 percent, all conservation efforts crumbled in the path of immediate money politics. First, the tuna commission rescinded the 50 percent catch reduction before it was ever implemented. Then, they abandoned a commitment to adopt a recovery plan.
By now a new government commissioner, Will Martin, was in charge, and though he spoke silver-tongued to conservationists—using all the right buzzwords about “sustainability” and “precaution”—he was careful not to anger or disappoint the tuna industry. With an emboldened tuna lobby pressing closer, nipping his heels and snarling for more, Martin threw precaution to the wind. Someone said he developed Stockholm (a.k.a. Patty Hearst) syndrome—adopting the personality of one’s captors—but that would be taking credit away from decisions that were his. After helping rescind the quota cut, he led the charge for
two quota increases in 1994 and 1996, the first of which he enigmatically called a “conservation measure”; the other increase he referred to oddly and oxymoronically as “keeping the status quo.” (He said he expected that this latter 154-ton increase would soon be offset by regulations requiring all fish discarded dead at sea to be counted against the quota, so there would be essentially no net mortality increase. He was the only one who believed this might happen in the forseeable future. And in fact it didn’t.) In a Department of Commerce press release, Mr. Martin said, “The modest quota increase for western bluefin tuna sends an appropriate signal that when conservation works, the concessions of our fishermen can be rewarded by increases in harvests.”
Concessions? Much of this struck me as utterly disingenuous and intentionally misleading. I was not the only one who saw it this way. Dr. Paul Boyle of the New York Aquarium for Wildlife Conservation faxed me the press release and wrote in the margin: “How has it ‘worked’? Seems like the usual self-congratulation for grossly inadequate outcomes! An increase in the W. Atlantic strikes me as completely inappropriate.”
Just how inappropriate? The commission’s own scientists had written clearly that the new quota Mr. Martin was pushing for would entail a 10 percent chance of driving the population to extinction within a decade. But his mind was set.
In sum, the cuts and subsequent increases in the quota amounted to a round-trip that by the late 1990s put the catch almost back up to where it had been in the late 1980s. The only thing that really changed was that the fish, bumping along at a low population level, were now reproducing worse than ever. Scientists searching for bluefin larvae in the Gulf of Mexico have been unable to find any recently, suggesting that the spawning population may be reaching the point of collapse.
Yet all was not absolutely riddled with cynicism, not totally bleak. With swordfish in a nosedive and the long-liners in a panic of their own making, the commission cut the North Atlantic swordfish quota by a third for 1997, effective through to 1999. If that commitment is honored and extended, it should help to at least stabilize the swordfish’s populations. Lord knows, those broadbills need a break, though prompting a recovery would require further cuts.
But like many agencies entrusted with stewarding natural resources, the Atlantic tuna commission has always confused process with progress and progress with success. Procedure is still the commission’s chief product. There are still no management plans, no recovery timetables, no recovery goals, and not one population of tuna, swordfish, or marlin managed to produce the “maximum sustainable yield,” as the commission’s own charter requires. Virtually all these species are overexploited.
The population of bluefin in the Mediterranean Sea continues to bear a fishing free-for-all, with catches twice the sustainable level. A commission recommendation to freeze catch levels was ignored, followed by the highest take of bluefin ever. It is only a matter of time before the need for restraint becomes universally apparent—if not by foresight then by hindsight.
As for bluefin off the east coast of North America, with the fish from the last mediocre spawnings of the late 1980s nearing maturity in the late 1990s, fishers thought they saw a recovery in the slight bulge that was entering the adult population. But I suspect that when the snake passes this egg, it will probably be skinnier than ever, because so few young are coming up the ranks behind them. I hope, as I often do, that I am wrong.
Kenyan conservation scientist David Western, who had tried to have Kenya initiate a global CITES proposal for the bluefin but “had to withdraw under political pressure from Japan and other countries that have a deep vested interest,” remarked, “It is one of those species for which politics overrides any concern … . The tuna is still an issue. It will continue to become a bigger issue.”
I suspect it will, because in my opinion the bluefin tuna remains the most purposely mismanaged large animal in the world.
On Long Island, I went to salve my disappointment with sushi. The head chef recommended some longline-caught bigeye tuna that he’d just gotten from Ecuador. The thought of drowned albatrosses bothered me, but I nodded anyway even while I wondered how much longer I could justify doing so. It was delicious, but that was never the question. I told the chef I’d read that bluefin was overfished; did he think that was true?
In slightly broken English he responded, “Overfished, yes. Bluefin, we can’t afford. But, yes, overfished.” Then he added, “Did you eat sushi last week?”
“No, I can’t afford to eat sushi every week.” I grinned.
“Last week, no tuna!” he exclaimed. “Last week, almost no sushi restaurants in whole New York area have tuna. For first time, no tuna any kind in market. Overfished. I think: In ten years, maybe no more tuna for sushi.”
I took a sip of my warm sake and wondered at the meaning of having met someone more worried about tuna than I.
Spring is a time of renewal, and needing a jump-start on feeling renewed, I accepted an invitation by marine scientist Barbara Block to join her crew in Cape Hatteras for a few days in early 1997 to implant new high-tech electronic tags into large bluefin tuna.
Dr. Block, a protégé of Frank Carey (the man who’d developed acoustical tags for tracking swordfish), has learned more about tunas and marlins in the wild—their evolution, physiology, and behavior—than anyone. Though still in her mid-thirties, Block has earned a reputation as a brilliant, world-class biologist. In quality, quantity, and diversity, her work already far surpasses most scientists’ entire career output. She’d assembled in Cape Hatteras a retinue of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, biologists, and wildlife veterinarians, mostly from her Stanford University lab in Monterey, California. Block was again pushing the
envelope on new technologies, having just helped develop two kinds of computerized “tags” that actually store data on an animal’s movements, allowing scientists, for the first time, to understand the travel patterns of wild fish in the ocean over long periods.
Spring was indeed in the air as I drove south along the Outer Banks. Though March had barely begun to shudder off the grip of winter, the afternoon was shirtsleeve warm, and northward-migrating birds were streaming up the beach even as the gulls and gannets of winter continued working still-chilly waters. Along the Atlantic coast, early spring does not follow winter so much as overtake it.
Barbara Block had come to Hatteras to execute a research program designed specifically to take scientific advantage of a unique situation. Sportfishermen had discovered a concentration of bluefin tuna in the Gulf Stream nearby. This allowed scientific access to these animals that was unparalleled anywhere else in the world, for two reasons: One, the fish were ravenously hungry and aggressive and astonishingly easy to catch; two, the commercial season for large bluefin was still closed for the winter and the fish could not be killed or sold, so many sportfishing boats were willing to cooperate in a tag-and-release program.
I found the house Dr. Block and her team had converted to a research station, and, after a dinner of fresh striped bass caught from the surf by several of the scientists, Barbara showed me the new computerized instruments she and her colleagues had developed for this project. The first, called an archival tag, is implanted into the fish (it is a little larger than your index finger) and it logs the fish’s position, depth, body temperature, and surrounding water temperature for as long as several years. Block explained, “The tag wakes up every two minutes to take the data, and stores the information in an electronic memory.” A short light-sensing wire stalk protruding from the instrument senses the interval between dawn and dusk, allowing the unit’s microprocessor components to calculate latitude and longitude using time of daylight and an internal clock. Another, even more remarkable new instrument stores all the same information, but at a pre-set interval that can range from days to several years the tag unit electronically detaches itself, comes to the sea surface, and begins transmitting its stored information to an orbiting satellite—which then sends the data to Block’s laboratory! These “pop-up tags” had proven themselves in pool tests with captive yellowfin tuna, but Barbara had put the first ones into wild bluefins only a week or so before I arrived. She’d programmed these to come off within a few days, and to the amazement of no one who knows Barbara Block, they were working well.
With this technology, we will be able to learn, for the first time, a lot about what these animals really do: how they use their habitat, how they behave—how they function. We will be able to understand them more on their own terms, as though we could pull back the sea’s covers and just watch. Perhaps the more we understand these animals’ complexities, the more they will surprise and delight us, and the more we will appreciate them.
For the first time in years, I had a hard time sleeping due solely to excitement. Anticipation of seeing what I consider the most excitingly innovative—and some of the most important—wildlife research in North America kept me hoping the alarm would soon signal time to rise.
Wind howled all night, but dawn came calm, and we prepared for a day at sea. Block and several assistants switched on the computers that seemed to dominate the house, and via the Internet they downloaded the most recent satellite maps of sea surface temperatures, showing the position of the Gulf Stream’s edge.
In a thirty-five-foot New England—styled boat named Bullfrog, we threaded our way through a menacing-looking Hatteras Inlet and headed offshore. We didn’t need the maps to tell us where the Gulf Stream was. Twenty miles from the inlet, rough and white-capped seventy-five degree water was steaming eerily into the cool air as though we’d sailed into a great cauldron. Using sonar, we searched along the Stream’s temperature edge for an hour, two hours. Three hours. The game plan was to find a school, chum them up, and then either catch fish or have hooked fish transferred to us from other boats for tagging. When a boat called to report they were hooked to a fish, we—and three dozen or so other boats in the fleet—raced over like a flock of terns converging. Arriving boats began throwing whole herring, and the school of big fish came up crashing through the surface as chum disappeared in deep boils and explosions of foam, and boats began hooking up around us amid screaming birds and shouted instructions.
We heaved a tennis ball attached to the end of our line into the boat with the first hooked fish. They unsnapped their leader from their line and snapped it onto ours, thus transferring their hooked fish to the end of our line.
I was in the chair and readied on the rod, and when the line shot tight the big fish snapped me to my feet in the harness, a single safety cord holding me into the boat. The rod arced under a fresh surge downward and to my shock I felt my knees begin to buckle. For a few worried moments it seemed the fish would actually collapse my stance the way a winning arm wrestler’s relentless pressure crushes his opponent. Then the line began slipping from the reel, I regained my footing, and over a few minutes I worked the already tired fish up.
Captain Bob Eakes opened the transom door and grabbed the straining leader. By way of a splattering of language best described as colorful, he shouted for the mate to turn the Bullfrog down-sea. With several people pulling, a following wave helped shove the three-hundred-pound animal onto the deck.
Waiting as the fish slid through the door and onto a padded mat were Block and several assistants—all in boots and waterproof overalls—one of whom immediately started a stopwatch. Biologist Chuck Farwell instantly shoved a hose into the gasping giant’s mouth to irrigate the gills with oxygen-rich seawater. “Beautiful fish; nice fish,” he breathed as he covered the beast’s shifting eye with a dark wet cloth to calm it. Its laquered back was deep blue, its flanks edged
with a lighter, luminous electric blue that bordered a burnishing bronze, finally grading to the metallic silver-gray of its belly.
The deck was tense and quiet as the team quickly moved into kneeling positions around the animal and got to work. Farwell swiftly removed the hook and handed one end of a measuring tape to Block, then called out the fish’s length to a man with a clipboard. Thirty-one-year-old Dr. Heidi Dewar, scalpel ready, bent to work. Seas had grown increasingly sloppy, and some water sloshed across the deck, causing the fish to slide a little. Surgeon Dewar waited a moment. Then she pushed the scalpel through the giant tuna’s leathery hide, making a slight incision and shaving a tiny sliver of muscle for later genetic analysis. She handed the muscle sample to Block, who placed it in a waiting vial, labeled it, and passed it up to a waiting assistant. Block inserted the internal tag. While Dewar sutured the small wound, Block darted two external tags into the animal’s back, marking this fish as the bearer of an internal archival tag, worth a cool thousand dollars to the finder—value added to the world’s most valuable fish.
We swiveled the mat and slid the fish head-first back into the sea, and it took off like a shot and vanished. In another boat, Dr. Eric Prince of the National Marine Fisheries Service and wildlife veterinarian Tom Williams of the Monterey Bay Aquarium were also putting Dr. Block’s state-of-the-art instruments into husky tuna.
The invasiveness of all the handling and surgery was a little disconcerting, but a far stretch better than bleeding and icing the bluefins for a trip to Tokyo would have been. In Cape Cod Bay, when I’d facetiously asked Gerry Abrams if he planned to tag any fish we might catch, he’d answered, “There’s not a tag in this whole fleet.” Here, there were only tags. All the fish being caught on the sport boats were being released, and captains said they felt “honored” to be able to pass fish off to scientists for the high-tech research.
These bluefins were not the five-hundred-pound-plus monsters commonly caught in New England. They averaged two hundred to three hundred and fifty pounds. Many were the eight- to ten-year-old fish from the last moderately productive spawning years in the late 1980s—some from the same age class I’d seen demolishing butterfish off Block Island a few years earlier. They were now just maturing, and in a year or so—if they survived—would probably venture to the Gulf of Mexico to join the remaining older fish for their first breeding.
Three out of the initial fourteen fish our boats handled carried hooks from previous encounters. One fish had two older hooks, plus ours, suggesting that pressure was high. Some local captains wanted to be able to kill one fish per day, and already, fishermen from New England were pressing for a winter opening so they could bring their commercial boats down here to export fish.
All in all, I saw the abundance of these young adult fish here less as deliverance than as a fragile and inspiring opportunity. Used as an excuse for increased exploitation, their potential would be squandered. Shepherded into the future,
they could perhaps salvage a last best chance to spawn strong new generations and avoid having the bluefin go the way of the buffalo—a relict reminder of a time of plenty.
Bullfrog’s engine roared as we raced toward our last fish transfer of the waning day. In late afternoon the big tuna became very active, and watching them crashing herring thrown behind our boat was so astonishing it kept distracting me from scientific duties on deck. Each handful of fish that hit the surface instantly drew a gleaming, seven-foot-long, wide-bodied rocket from the deep. Often two or three big bluefins raced competitively for the same fish, their fins slicing the surface like drawn sabers of charging horsemen, with the winner sending up geysers and drawing cheers and then blasting the herring like there was no tomorrow. But we were here to help ensure that there was a tomorrow, and seeing all these fish shot us through with great hope and exuberance. These speeding torpedoes were no buffalo, no mere remnants. These were the rushing vitality and power of the sea incarnate. These, we hoped, were the future.