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
Who's number one?
Believe it or not, the most popular tuna in the world is not the noble bluefin. It is not the formidable yellowfin, nor is it the rocket-powered albacore. Believe it or not, the most popular tuna is in the world is a small, maroon-fleshed bullet of a fish that is not even in the same genus as the aforementioned three musketeers. I’m speaking, of course, of the humble katsuwonus pelamis – the skipjack tuna.
That would be me
Even though it’s exceedingly rare to encounter skipjack tuna in a white-tablecloth restaurant, and even though you and I will probably never see at skipjack fillets at our local grocery store seafood counter, this fish is king when it comes to tuna sales. If you were to total up all the tuna yanked out of the oceans in a single year, the majority of that mammoth catch would be composed of skipjack. So if it’s not in the back kitchens of our restaurants, and it’s not lying atop the crushed ice beds our seafood merchants’ display cases, where is it?
As delicious as skipjack can be — anyone who has had a properly prepared katsuo tataki knows exactly what I mean — the vast majority of the world’s skipjack ends up ignominiously smashed into bits, flash-cooked into oblivion, and sealed in a can. Canned skipjack tends to be a unpalatable, low-value product that relies on cheap production methods. If it is to turn a profit, it must be produced in a manner that is excruciatingly effective (just as a thermonuclear strike is an effective way of, say, unclogging a sink drain.)
Purse seine: circle of death
To this end, skipjack tuna is caught almost exclusively through the use of industrial purse seiners. A purse seine is a type of net which, like its eponymous accessory, is basically a goodie bag with a closing mechanism. Purse seine nets are dropped into the water and maneuvered around a school of fish, and then a drawstring is pulled which closes the net and draws it tight around its catch. The fish are compressed together, and the unfortunate animals along the sides are sliced to ribbons by the taut ropes of the net. As the catch is hauled out of the water in a tight silvery ball, the seine net literally rains blood.
The main issue that we are facing when it comes to purse seining is the use of something called a fish aggregating device (FAD). FADs are floating objects that are thrown into the water in order to provide structure and shade in the open ocean. They can be anything that floats and provides shade — from sophisticated mega-buoys with sonar and radio capabilities to half-rotten doors plucked from garbage heaps behind ramshackle fishing villages.
Fish magnet
Small fish are attracted to FADs, and they in turn attract larger fish, which attract larger fish, and so on. FADs are popular among purse seiners because they concentrate fish into a small area. Having all the fish together in one place decreases the amount of effort necessary for a given ship to capture its quarry.
Unfortunately, FADs don’t only attract tuna. Many other animals are also attracted to the shade and the presence of forage fish. Because of this, purse seiners that use FADs tend to incur much higher levels of bycatch than their non-FAD counterparts. Tuna seiners employing FADs regularly haul up immature yellowfin and bigeye tuna, sharks, marine mammals, and other unfortunate animals caught in their nets. Only the tiniest fraction of these non-target organisms survive the grisly, gore-soaked process of being caught in a purse seine net.
Industrial purse seiners are causing tremendous problems for the health of the ocean. Not only is the fishing capacity of these rapacious behemoths beyond the productivity potential of the targeted skipjack populations, but they slaughter hundreds of thousands of other animals in the process through the use of FADs. If we are to offer some respite to these creatures, we must forbid the use of FADs in the world’s oceans. To put it simply — this carnage must be stopped. Unfortunately, this all takes places in the middle of the open ocean, thousands of miles from prying eyes.
Rainbow warriors
In order convince the relevant policy-making bodies (national governments, international management bodies, etc) that FADs must be banned, we must have thorough documentation of their devastating impact. With that in mind, the captain and crew of Greenpeace’s Esperanza is plying the waters of the Eastern Pacific Ocean in an effort to confront these purse seiners and gather proof of their actions.
And I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to come along.
I will be joining the Esperanza as the on-board campaigner for this tour. I fly to Tahiti tomorrow to meet the ship, and will be at sea until early December. The ship is fully internet capable, and I will endeavor to provide regular updates in addition to my standard sushi-related blogging. So please keep checking back; hopefully I’ll have some good stories for you.
This FAD must end
I haven’t been to sea for any significant length of time for over three years, and I’m a bit nervous… but this is a fantastic opportunity and a worthy cause. After writing so many blog entries and articles about the plight of the world’s tuna, this is a welcome chance to give my pen a rest and get back in the action. The battle against FADs is tremendously important, and I’m truly flattered to be given this opportunity to spend some time on the front lines.
I’ll send pictures.
This article continues in a subsequent post.
Tags: aggregate, aggregating, bluefin, canned tuna, esperanza, FAD, greenpeace, purse seine, seine, skipjack, tahiti, yellowfin
