Posted by Casson on Aug 15, 2011 in
4 Oceans,
Serial Pieces 
It may be in a can, and it may say chicken, but it's still a fish. Seriously, Jessica.
Seafood isn’t only sold in the seafood section. Americans buy a tremendous amount our seafood from the shelves of our local grocer rather than from the freezers, including one particular item that we put in everything from sandwiches to casseroles to salads: tuna fish.
For decades, tuna was the most widely consumed seafood product in the United States. Although it has recently lost pole position to farmed shrimp, it is still massively popular, and even though it’s in a can, it is still fish, and thus merits scrutiny in terms of sustainable practices – or, in this case, its total lack thereof.
Here’s the issue: catching tuna in a manner that keeps the price hovering around $1-$2 per can is difficult. It’s a challenging process for a number of reasons, not least of which is that most species of tuna are constantly on the move across the vastness of the open ocean. Chasing these schools around is a time- and resource-intensive process – especially with oil prices on the perpetual upswing – but the tuna industry has found a way to cut some pretty significant corners. Unfortunately, this has led to any number of nasty consequences, and those smiling bumblebees and luxuriating mermaids on the tuna cans at your neighborhood grocery store have done a great job covering them up… until now.
The tuna industry’s got a dirty little secret – actually, it has four of them. And here they are.
1) Fish aggregating devices
Fish aggregating devices (aka FADs) are floating objects that tuna vessels cast adrift in the open ocean. They are generally attached to a radio beacon and can relay their position back to a given tuna boat. FADs work because fish in the open ocean find random flotsam absolutely captivating. Small plants and polyps anchor themselves to the physical body of the FAD, small fish use it as a hiding place, and larger animals flock to it as a source of shade and as a fertile hunting ground. After a few weeks at sea, a FAD can develop an entire ecosystem around it – which is wiped out entirely when the tuna boat returns and scoops the whole thing up in a seine net.
A juvenile bigeye killed in a FAD-associated skipjack seine. There were hundreds more under my feet... and that was just one haul on one ship.
The problem here is that FADs don’t just attract the target species of tuna (usually skipjack). They are similarly mesmerizing to sharks, billfish, and other animals – most notably juvenile yellowfin and bigeye tuna – that come swimming by wondering what all the fuss is about. By then, it’s generally too late.FADs increase bycatch in the skipjack tuna industry by between 500% and 1000% when compared to nets set on free-swimming schools (FAD-free seining.) To make matters worse, between 15% and 20% of the total catch of a FAD-associated skipjack seine is actually juvenile yellowfin and bigeye – two species of tuna that are in serious trouble and cannot afford to have their young purloined before they ever have a chance to breed. The total content of bigeye and yellowfin in FAD-free skipjack seines is less than 1%.
I’ll put this plainly – if we don’t stop using FADs, we will run out of yellowfin and bigeye tuna because we will kill all of the juveniles.
Rule one for sustainable canned tuna: When shopping for “light” tuna, buy pole-and-line or FAD-free seined skipjack.
2) Longlines
Cans of “white” tuna contain albacore, a temperate tuna species that is only popular in canned form in North America. Albacore isn’t caught with purse seines as often as it is caught on longlines – an equally destructive practice that incurs a tremendous amount of bycatch.
A turtle caught on a Korean longliner's tuna gear. It's dead.
Longlines are just that – long lines set by fishing vessels that stretch from buoy to buoy across the open ocean, sometimes for multiple miles at a stretch. Every few yards, a long lead ending in a baited hook dangles from the main line. When the ship circles back to reel in the longline and assess its catch, it contains far more than albacore tuna. This indiscriminate fishing method is one of the greatest killers of turtles (which get hooked nibbling on the bait, can’t return to the surface to breathe, and drown), albatross and other seabirds (which dive on the glinting hooks thinking that they’re fish and are subsequently snagged), and other non-targeted animals.
The total bycatch rate of this massively destructive operation is estimated to be somewhere just shy of 30% of the total take… that means nearly one third of the total global catch of the albacore fleet – thousands upon thousands of tons per year – is turtles, sharks, sea birds, and other casualties of the industry’s callousness and greed.
Absolutely unacceptable.
Rule two for sustainable canned tuna: When shopping for “white” tuna, buy pole-and-line albacore.
3) Unregulated fishing on the high seas
Outside of the boundaries of a country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which stretches two hundred miles into the ocean beyond the shores of any given state, there exists a lawless, oceanic “Wild West” known as the high seas. When it comes to fishing, most anything goes out there as there are no universally acknowledged enforcement bodies that can serve to protect our common resources.
The water runs red with the blood of the tuna. As a seine net closes, the plastic filaments cut into the fish, slicing them to ribbons. Mortality in a seine operation approaches 100% -- another reason that there's no such thing as an "eco-FAD".
Tuna vessels regularly park just shy of this two hundred mile line, inside what are often referred to as the “high seas pockets” – four areas of unregulated ocean that are fully encircled by the EEZs of any number of island states in the western and central Pacific that depend on tuna stocks for their economic livelihood. Tuna, of course, know nothing of international boundaries, and pass freely back and forth over these lines until they are netted up by a nearby predatory seiner. Since these vessels are operating in what are technically high seas areas, they have no rules to follow – no quotas, no maximum limits, etc. – and they don’t have to pay dues or access fees to the countries that actually own and manage the resources. Activities like transshipping (transferring fish from one vessel to another to allow for longer fishing times and less resource expenditure) are common, which further reduces the abilities of these nearby states to manage their tuna stocks sustainably.
Rule three for sustainable canned tuna: Tuna should be caught in managed waters. Buy tuna from companies that refuse to fish in the high seas pockets.
4) Stolen fish, stolen future
Following on the above point, might tends to make right when there aren’t any overarching laws offering protection to those involved. The tuna industry has been the scene of an infuriating amount of bullying over the past decades, mainly by larger, more wealthy nations – countries like Taiwan, Spain, the United States – that have ransacked the waters of the independent Pacific Island states. Countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu have virtually no resources aside from tuna, and without a modicum of international law and market support to enable them to draw a fair and honest living from it, the established international tuna barons – companies like Thai Union (which owns the well-known US brand Chicken of the Sea), Fong Chin Formosa, and Dong Won – are able to pillage their waters with near impunity. Recently, a number of tuna-rich but cash-poor Pacific island states have banded together in an effort to take charge of their fisheries and to keep the tuna pirates out of their watery backyards. These states are known collectively as the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA), and they represent one of our best chances to foster a sustainable and equitable tuna industry that protects both the ocean’s tuna populations, and the peoples that depend on them.
For more information about the PNA and their struggle to wrest control of their own resources back from outside forces, please take a moment and watch this video.
Rule four for sustainable canned tuna: Buy tuna from companies that support the PNA.
Tags: bigeye, bumble bee, canned, charlie, chicken of the sea, dirty little secret, greenpeace, grocery tuna, skipjack, sorry, starkist, tuna, yellowfin
Same old same old
Sometimes when I sit down to write one of these posts, I get a sort of melancholy déjà vu. So many of the problems that plague our oceans stem from the same root causes; it’s almost like writing the same article over and over again. Avarice, financial myopia, cultural misunderstandings, and apathetic complacency are frustratingly ubiquitous when we try to decipher and disassemble the tangled, parasitic relationship that we’ve developed with our oceans.
It also seems like every time we start digging into ocean conservation issues anywhere on the planet, we find ourselves up against the same culprits: a small clique of nations that have taken to fishing in a serious way. I suppose this is logical given the total consumption (as well as the per capita consumption) of seafood in these particular countries: they are the source of a tremendous share of the world’s seafood demand, and thus have a vested interest in access the supply freely and without interference from other parties. Still, one would think that their respective decision makers would understand that in order to have fish tomorrow, we have to take proper care of the fish today…. right?
Anyhow, onto the matter at hand.
Perks of the job
Last week, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), a body which oversees the regulations governing tuna fishing throughout much of the world’s largest ocean, came together in Tahiti for its annual meeting. Representatives from over a dozen countries flew to Papeete in order to discuss the worrying state of Pacific tunas, concentrating especially on skipjack and bigeye.
There was a great hope that much could be achieved at this meeting. Scores of artisanal fishermen teamed up with local and international NGOs in any number of demonstrations to drive home the fact that these animals are in need of protection. The Pacific is the last ocean with bigeye tuna populations anywhere near healthy levels, and it was made clear that unless stringent and effective quotas are implemented — in conjunction with new closures and off-limits areas — we may lose this stock as well.
Catch us if you can
As I discussed in a previous series of posts, a great deal of the Pacific bigeye stock is taken as bycatch by seiners that are seeking skipjack tuna. In the Western and Central Pacific, these seiners tend to operate in what are known as “donut holes” or “high seas pockets”: areas of ocean that are surrounded by the territorial waters of various countries but are just beyond the 200-mile exclusive economic zone of any of them. Seining was banned in two of the four major pockets in the Pacific Ocean during the WCPFC meeting in 2008, and most of the Pacific island nations were hoping to seal the deal and protect the remaining two this year.
Alas. Enter the usual suspects.
There are three key states that have a long-standing track record of blocking this kind of progress in the Pacific: South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. These countries tend to work as a bloc to forestall regulatory measures that would preclude their fleets from plundering the Pacific at will. Lamentably, this meeting proved to be no exception.
On my own
A group of small island states proposed a 50% reduction in the overall bigeye tuna quota. South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, joined by China and the Philippines, opposed the measure — even though their own scientists advised them to do otherwise. In the face of this obstinacy, the proposal never had a chance. It died horribly right there in the room and left the Pacific bigeye populations unprotected.
To add insult to injury, I should note that it was actually the Japanese that raised the issue about tuna welfare in the first place. The Japanese delegation went on record early in the meeting stating that no other tuna species can be allowed to decline to the point of meeting the CITES Appendix I criteria, as the northern bluefin does (this was, by the way, the first time that the Japanese government has admitted that northern bluefin qualifies for CITES protection.) Japan also expressed concern over the state of sharks, especially hammerheads, in the Pacific. This is good news, right? The largest per capita seafood consumer in the world standing up for the oceans?
Well, a couple of days later, they reversed their stance, blocked all precautionary proposals and quota reductions, and ensured that bigeye and yellowfin tuna continue on the fast track to endangered species land. Thanks guys.
Yeah... like an impoverished puppy
To be fair, there’s really no room for any kind of flag-waving on my part. The US delegation actually arrived at the meeting planning to oppose these precautionary measures as well. In the end they were persuaded to abstain from the vote, but still, hardly a pride-inducing course of action.
The presence of a new and woefully inexperienced chairman did not help matters. At one point, when one of the delegations raised concerns about the state of porbeagle sharks in the Pacific, the chairman was quoted as saying, “What? What’s a pork barrel shark?”
Yeah. I’m not kidding.
Catch of the day
In the end, it pretty much all fell apart. Despite strong efforts from France, Australia, numerous Pacific island nations, Greenpeace, and several local environmental groups, the meeting ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. Two enormous high seas pockets remain open to purse seiners that regularly take large quantities of juvenile bigeye. Sharks and tuna are still without succor, their diminishing populations at the mercy of relentless longliners.
Still… there’s gotta be a silver lining here somewhere. Hang on, I’ll find something…
Oh, yeah. Here we go.
This miserable outcome has upset many of these Pacific island states to no end. In fact, it may lead renegotiation of access agreements by these tiny countries: if the WCPFC can’t effectively protect these delicate fisheries, the Pacific island governments may just have to go it alone. They’re even talking about withdrawing from the Commission if it can’t serve it’s purpose, and relying on bilateral negotiation in an attempt to keep these foreign fleets out of their waters.
Preach on
Wait a minute — that’s it? That’s the silver lining? We’re finding our solace in the breakdown of an attempted multinational management body in favor of a clutch of one-off two-party agreements of dubious strength and effectiveness? In an emergency backpedaling in the face of failure? In the inability of key stakeholder countries to see the writing on the wall and to take the simple, logical action necessary to protect their economy, environment, and children?
Wow. Whatever’s happening in Copenhagen right now must be contagious.
Tags: bigeye, china, commission, high seas, japan, korea, pacific, papeete, pockets, porbeagle, quota, seiner, skipjack, spain, tahiti, taiwan, tuna, WCPFC, yellowfin
This article is continued from a previous post.
Desperate times
As promised, after four weeks of waiting, I finally have something substantial to report.
At three o’clock on a dark, sweaty Thursday morning, I was called to the bridge by the watchkeeper. I stumbled through the alleyways and hauled myself up two rolling and pitching stairwells, my shirt clammy and wrinkled and my eyes bloodshot from a long bout with insomnia. After nearly a month at sea and nothing to show for it, I was dearly hoping that I had been summoned for a good reason, not for just another false alarm. Please, I pleaded silently, please let there be a ship out there.
My bleary eyes were directed to the softly backlit radar screen, and suddenly my adrenals shot into overdrive and I was wide awake. There wasn’t just one ship on the screen – there were four.
Somehow, in the middle of the night, we had bumbled our way right into the center of a fishing fleet.
Filling their purse
As soon as it was light enough to see, the Esperanza’s crew sprung into action. A launch was scrambled and the boarding team shot off towards the nearest seiner, which had already set its net and was beginning to haul it in.
Our launch pulled up alongside the fishing vessel, close enough that we could almost touch the floats that kept the seine net in contact with the water’s surface. The massive net was looped around a FAD that had been bobbing in the water for a week or more. The seiner’s crew hooked the seine net drawstring to a massive, towering winch, and slowly the net began to constrict as the drawstring pulled tight: an ocean-going python of immense length and power.
A bloody mess
Eventually the fish trapped within the net began to panic. We began to see tuna jumping and splashing frantically, churning what had been the ocean’s calm surface waters to a white, bubbly froth. The net pulled tighter and tighter, forcing hundreds, even thousands of these animals together into a lethal gridlock. The winch slowly and inexorably cranked the net aloft, as unstoppable and unforgiving as the reaper’s scythe. The massive weight of the catch forced the strands of the net into the scales and flesh of the unfortunate animals on the bottom. The seine began to weep blood.
The fish were hoisted onto the deck and dumped into the cargo hold. We boarded the ship and set about scouring the decks and holds for evidence of bycatch. Our photographer and videographer documented everything as the unwanted catch, including dorado (mahi mahi), triggerfish, marlin, and mackerel, was tossed over the side or simply tossed into a trough that served as a temporary storage for bycatch. The fishermen were actually quite pleasant and helpful as a general rule, although that may have been because the language barrier prevented us from offering an in-depth explanation of our true motivation.
One of the lucky ones
Throughout the day, the boarding team cycled back and forth among the different ships, witnessing, boarding, and documenting. On two separate occasions we saw turtles ensnared by the seiners. They had been attracted to the FADs and were in the wrong place at the wrong time when the ship set. Luckily, the fishermen were able to free the animals both times. Turtles aren’t always so fortunate in these situations.
On one of the ships, I managed to sweet-talk my way deep into the guts of the ship so I could crawl into the fish hold itself. I rummaged through a pile of thousands of dead and dying skipjack, looking for juvenile bigeye and yellowfin tuna that had been netted along with their more numerous cousins. It only took me a matter of seconds to find the first, a bigeye that was no larger than my forearm. After that, I started to see them everywhere. My rough estimate is that between 10 and 15 percent of the seiner’s total catch was juvenile bigeye and yellowfin.
Don't it make your bigeyes blue
I grabbed a dead bigeye and a dead skipjack and showed them to a fisherman. I pointed at the skipjack and asked him in Spanish what it was called. He looked at me blankly and replied, “atun.” I nodded, and then pointed to the bigeye. “This one is different, though,” I said, “it’s a different species. What’s this one called?” He shrugged and gave me a friendly grin. “Atun,” he said.
Maybe that’s part of the problem.
We repeated these visits all day, moving from ship to ship, documenting clean catches as well as hauls that were stuffed with unwanted animals. I saw dozens of dying mahi mahi and triggerfish tossed back into the sea, left to bleed out and sink to their doom. Large, majestic marlin, crushed and suffocated by the seining process, were tucked away in back corners of the hold as a private stash for the seiner’s captain. Worst of all, we saw hundreds of baby bigeye and yellowfin tuna – species already under serious threat — meet their end as they got lost in the shuffle, mixed in with skipjack destined for low-value tins. No doubt the bigeye and yellowfin stocks will never be able to recover if we keep purloining their young, but that is precisely what is happening.
We shall overcome
Still, as troubling as it was to witness these travesties, morale on the ship has never been higher. We have done what we set out to do — obtained photographic proof of the horrifying bycatch associated with these FAD seiners. We still have several more days to search, but even if we end up with nothing more than what we’ve already collected, it is certainly enough to convince me that something rotten is afoot in the Eastern Pacific.
Tags: ban, bigeye, billfish, bycatch, camera, dorado, ecuador, FAD, mahi, marlin, net, purse seine, seine, seiner, skipjack, triggerfish, tuna, turtle, video, yellowfin
Net full of problems
Anyone who has seen one of my presentations or endured my presence on a panel has probably heard me lambaste bluefin tuna ranching. I often employ a hackneyed analogy to describe this phenomenon by equating ranching bluefin to “farming tigers.” The reasoning behind this has to do with the position that bluefin occupies in the oceanic food web. Bluefin tuna are top carnivores in the watery realms, and thus are similar to the great cats and other apex predators here on terra firma.
The point here is simple: we don’t farm great cats. Not just because they don’t taste good (although I can’t imagine that they do), but because it makes exactly zero sense from the perspective of an agriculturist. A tiger farmer would have to raise or purchase grass or grain to feed herbivores (such as cows), raise and fatten the cows, and then slaughter the cows to feed the tigers. The amount of salable protein generated by butchering the tigers would be only a fraction of what the farmer could realize by butchering and selling the cows (not to mention how much more efficient it would be to simply sell the grain itself for human consumption.)
There are two differences between a bluefin ranch and a theoretical tiger farm from a markets perspective. The first is demand. Aside from a peripheral black market, based primarily in China, that values the penis and gall bladder of the animal for pseudo-medicinal purposes, there is no demand for tiger flesh. Bluefin, unfortunately, is struggling under the weight of tremendous demand driven by a rapidly expanding sushi industry.
Top cat
The second difference is the legal recognition (and a strong social awareness) of the animal’s plight. All of the world’s tiger subspecies are, lamentably, endangered at best. Ironically, the charisma of the tiger and the widespread awareness of its unenviable situation has earned it a tremendous amount of support in the form of global conservation effort. In fact, the tiger was voted the “world’s favorite animal” in a 2005 survey by Animal Planet (even defeating such lovable competitors as the dog and the dolphin.)
The bluefin tuna has no such succor. It is a migratory oceanic species and thus extremely difficult to protect through national legislation. International agreements such as ICCAT continue to fail to address the actual issues threatening the species (overfishing, bycatch, etc.) Moreover, while this animal is fascinating and extremely charismatic to those fortunate few who have interacted with it, the bluefin still suffers from the “it’s just a fish” veil of dismissal that keeps us at arm’s length from many of our ocean’s most awe-inspiring denizens.
Feeding food to food
The point of all this is to say that while we would never consider farming tigers as a protein source, we farm bluefin in great numbers, despite their relatively equivalent positions in their respective ecosystems. It’s an incredibly resource-intensive task to farm a bluefin. For every salable pound of tuna that comes out of a bluefin farm, up to twenty-five pounds of wild fish (often sardines and anchoveta from unmanaged fisheries) have gone in as feed. To make matters worse, bluefin are only very rarely reared ex ovo; traditionally, the juveniles are purloined from the wild and transferred to pens for fattening. Thus, every tuna that one purchases from a bluefun tuna farm is actually a wild tuna that never had an opportunity to breed. Needless to say, the world’s wild bluefin tuna populations are shadows of their former selves. The bluefin is, for all intents and purposes, an endangered species. Yet we continue to devour it without compunction.
Things seem bleak, indeed. And it is from this stark landscape that a new player has arisen, with a plan to ease the pressure.
Maybe.
Hawaii Oceanic Technology, a Honolulu-based company, is aiming to create a new tuna farm that instead of adding to the woes of the bluefin, will focus on one of it’s relatives: Thunnus obesus, the bigeye tuna. Ostensibly, this will lessen the overall pressure on bluefin by offering a similar fish to appease market demand.
Net pen aquaculture
While bluefin is generally fattened in inshore net pens, Hawaii Oceanic intends to construct an offshore farm, located about three miles off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. One of the potential advantages of offshore aquaculture is that it is thought to reduce the impact of waste by allowing effluent to diffuse through a much deeper water column. The revolutionary Kona Blue operation, similarly located in Hawaii, utilizes this principle in its production of Seriola rivioliana, which it markets as “Kona Kampachi.”
While there is still a pronounced paucity of evidence regarding this hypothesis, it seems to be based on reasonable assumptions, and I don’t want to dwell on it as I feel there are three other, more important issues at stake. Additionally, the prototype “Oceanspheres” that Hawaii Oceanic are developing for use as fish enclosures are really quite impressive — especially their use of OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion) technology, which is a virtually untapped renewable energy resource. I’m very interested to see where this leads.
Anyhow, back to the issues at hand.
Sexy sexy tuna belly
First off: market demand. Bigeye tuna, known as mebachi in Japanese, is indeed a source of tuna fillets, fatty belly cuts, etc. But to be frank, mebachi toro is simply not as alluring as honmaguro (bluefin) toro. As a matter of fact, the best replacement that I have found for the buttery, supple taste and texture of bluefin belly is high-quality shiromaguro toro – a belly cut from the albacore, bluefin’s much smaller cousin. I am not alone in my beliefs here. Sure, mebachi is still a much-demanded fish, but will it really affect the demand for bluefin?
The second issue is feed. As I mentioned before, farming bluefin is a protein-hungry business. Why would farming bigeye be any different? Hawaii Oceanic states that their goal is to eventually replace the fish used in the feed process with soy or an algae-based protein source, but that they will need to use fish meal at first.
Certainly one has to begin any new venture in stages… but how long are we talking about? There is no need for another fish-based tuna farm. There was never any environmental benefit to these operations in the first place. If indeed it were a farm fed entirely from sustainable sources, that would potentially change the equation — but there’s a big word between now and then, and that word is “eventually.” The lack of a hard timetable here casts some doubt on the rosy picture that Hawaii Oceanic has painted.
The final issue is the sourcing of the fish itself. One of the major problems with bluefin farms is that the fish are taken as juveniles from flagging wild stocks. Hawaii Oceanic pledges to surmount this obstacle by hatching bigeye from eggs in a controlled facility. These fry would then be transferred to the offshore pens for rearing.
"Mommy, where does tuna come from?"
This is a good plan, if it can be achieved. In essence, by allowing the company to breed tuna from a small clutch of broodstock rather than abducting wild fish, they can produce tuna without major detrimental impacts to the local populations (at least from a sourcing perspective.) But can they do it?
The A-Marine Kindai bluefin operation in Japan has managed to create a system where they hatch their fish in a similar manner. This type of aquaculture, known as “closed life cycle farming,” is certainly a step in the right direction. But is it missing the point?
Wow! Four pounds of fish in a convenient three-ounce package
Even if this kind of thing ends up working, we’re still dealing with an apex predator, and thus eating very high on the food chain. When trophic dynamics are considered, it becomes clear that the amount of energy demanded from natural (or, in this case, quasi-natural) cycles to produce something like a farmed tuna dwarfs the actual amount of protein received by the consumer. Farming this kind of animal is reinforcing a negative paradigm that has been held as gospel in the North American diet for far too long. Moreover, tuna do not have the fish oils and the omega-3s that many smaller, cold-water fish (such as mackerel and sardines) do, nor do they reproduce as quickly. Not to mention that this type of aquaculture is never going to “feed the world” — it’s simply too expensive.
Now that's progress!
While Hawaii Oceanic may be attempting to build a better mousetrap with this theoretical bigeye farm, we may be swapping tigers for lions. It we want a harmonious and sustainable relationship with the world’s oceans, it will take more than finding a way to create larger amounts of what the market currently demands. We need to be willing to significantly alter the way that we think about food, and I’m not sure how much of a change a bigeye farm really represents.
Tags: a-marine, albacore, animal, bigeye, bluefin, china, farm, hawaii, ICCAT, kampachi, kanpachi, kindai, kona, lion, mebachi, oceanic, oceansphere, OTEC, protein, ranch, sardine, shiromaguro, technology, tiger, toro, trophic
