Page 86 - World of Animals - Issue #28 Magazine

Endangered

Atlantic bluefin tuna

The bluefin tuna was once the king of the seas.

ATLANTIC BLUEFIN
TUNA Living in large shoals and hunting together, Atlantic
Thunnus thynnus

Class Actinopterygii bluefin are long-lived and highly migratory fish
that can be found throughout the Atlantic Ocean.
Their only crime is that, to sushi eaters, they taste

Territory Atlantic Ocean, delicious. Before the 1960s, bluefin tuna was only
Arctic Ocean,

Mediterranean Sea fished in small quantities; however, demand rose
Diet Fish and invertebrates

Lifespan 15 years as the fish became a Japanese delicacy and was
Adult weight 250kg (550lb)

Conservation status soon targeted heavily by commercial fisheries.
Now it is on the brink of extinction, having been
ENDANGERED unsustainably fished for so long.

The causes

of extinction

Overfi shing

Over the past few decades, numbers of bluefin tuna

have declined due to commercial and also unregulated

fishing. Illegal fishing of this animal means that no data

is kept or analysed, and often even regulated fishery

numbers are misinterpreted, making it incredibly difficult

to gain the state of bluefin in the wild.
Habitat degradation
Key habitats such as spawning grounds are crucial to
species survival. When these fragile locations are hit by
pollution and mismanagement, such as the oil spill from
Deepwater Horizon in 2010, it can have huge knock-on
effects for tuna survival.
Taking young fish

It’s not just taking an excess of fish that is an issue; it’s Tuna statistics

removing the fish that are too young to have had a

chance to reproduce. Bluefin develop slowly, not reaching

sexual maturity until five to eight years of age. When

juvenile fish are removed from the water, the species has
no hope of recovery.

A single bluefin 80 per cent of the Bluefin fi shing It’s not all bad:

What you can do… tuna was sold world’s bluefin tuna was banned in the bluefi n spawning
in Tokyo for
is eaten in Japan,
stock in the
Gulf of Mexico in
WWW.WORLDWILDLIFE.ORG/TUNA £1.09 million where it is known 1982, but fisheries Mediterranean has

To help save the bluefin, be vigilant about what tuna you eat. Always ask ($2 million) in as ‘hon-maguro’ or still net tuna nearly doubled

restaurants and fishmongers where they get their fish, and boycott bluefin

sourced from the Mediterranean. Find out more at the link above. January 2013 ‘kuro-maguro’ as bycatch since the 1950s
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