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Blue Fin Tuna – warm blooded, environmentally threatened species

New York Times – Tuna’s End, by Paul Greenberg: “Global seafood consumption has increased consistently to the point where we now remove more wild fish and shellfish from the oceans every year than the weight of the human population of China. This latest surge has taken us past the Age of Cod and landed us squarely in the Age of Tuna. Fishing has expanded over the continental shelves into the international no-man’s territory known as the high seas — the ocean territory that begins outside of national “exclusive economic zones,” or E.E.Z.’s, usually 200 nautical miles out from a country’s coast, and continues until it hits the E.E.Z. of another country. The high seas are owned by no one and governed by largely feeble multinational agreements. According to the Sea Around Us project of the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center, catches from the high seas have risen by 700 percent in the last half-century, and much of that increase is tuna. Moreover, because tuna cross so many boundaries, even when tuna do leave the high seas and tarry in any one nation’s territorial waters (as Atlantic bluefin usually do), they remain under the foggy international jurisdiction of poorly enforced tuna treaties…The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 7 of the 23 commercially fished tuna stocks are overfished or depleted. An additional nine stocks are also threatened.”

  • UN Fisheries and Aquaculture Department: Fishery Statistical Collections Global Tuna Catches by Stock – Collection Overview: “This database contains, for the principal market tuna species, nominal catches by fishing gear, species, stock, fishing country and year. Tuna and tuna-like species are very important economically and a significant source of food. They include approximately forty species occurring in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans and in the Mediterranean Sea. Their global production has tended to increase continuously from less than 0.6 million tonnes in 1950 to almost 6 million tonnes today.”
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