Pacific bluefin tuna are going the same way as their Atlantic cousins

By Frank Pope, Ocean Correspondent The world’s most expensive bluefin: this is a headline we haven’t seen the last of. Prices will keep on going up as the fish career towards extinction in the face of an inability to control fishing fleets. While prices will continue to go up, the weights per fish will go down — 230kg seems big until you compare it with the monster landed off Nova Scotia in 1976 that weighed nearly three times that. Pacific bluefin tuna are distinct from their Atlantic cousins, but the same trends are evident: the proportion of juvenile fish being caught is on the up. In 2008, a study of Mediterranean-caught bluefin in Japanese markets found that a third were juveniles. The World Wildlife Fund warns that there will be no more spawning bluefin in the Mediterranean in three years’ time. A lack of management in the Pacific will seal the fate of the region’s bluefin as surely as the failed efforts at regulation in the Atlantic. Not all Japan’s fishmongers are panicking. Some are speculating instead. According to the tuna market analyst Roberto Bregazzi, Japan has already stockpiled 47,000 tonnes of bluefin tuna for a time when commercial extinction has driven their price through the roof. …