[CINC] National Geographic Channel/Bluefin Tuna series

[paul jr petrich]

Ocean People,
 Starting the Sunday at 9 p.m. the Channel will National Geographic begin a reality series on New England fishermen and their hunt by rod and reel for the dwindling stocks of the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna.The series will explore all aspects of the issue about fishing this magnificent warm blooded fish, but strictly from the Atlantic Ocean perspective. There it spawns in the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean. I wonder if the series will mention that for most of the decades of the last century, the world record for the largest Bluefin Tuna caught by rod and reel was right here off our own Channel Islands. In the early 1900s one weighing 251lbs did the trick. The Tuna Club in Avalon was formed in 1898 to fish primarily for these giants with rod and reel. Through the 1930s many celebrities fished for them  through the Club, including journalist Zane Gray. In the 1950s a sport-fishing boat I decked on out of San Pedro as a teenager would regularly have a Bluefin weighing in the 40-50 lb range as a jackpot fish fishing off of Catalina or San Clemente islands.    Paul

Marine scientist Carl Safina, who grew up fishing the waters off Long Island, first saw an Atlantic bluefin tuna when he hooked one back in 1968. "It wasn't a very big bluefin, but it was the biggest fish I had ever caught," recalls Safina, the co-founder and president of the Blue Ocean Institute at Stony Brook University in New York. "And I was completely awed by it." He was amazed not just by the bluefin's size and power, but its streamlined, efficient body, which allows it to swim at speeds over 40 miles per hour and pursue prey thousands of feet into the ocean depths. It was equally amazing, he recalls, that such an extraordinary animal existed in such great numbers. "In those days, you would run into bluefin pretty much all over the place," he says. "You'd see them, even when you weren't looking for them."

Those days are long gone. The once-prolific Thunnus thynnus, a majestic creature that can reach over ten feet in length and up to a ton in weight, has been swimming the Atlantic for at least the past 40 million years. But today, some fear that the species' days are numbered due to a growing human craving for its fatty, succulent flesh, which is consumed raw as Japanese-style sushi. In the western Atlantic, the bluefin spawning population is now between 21 and 29 percent of what it was in 1970, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's estimate. A study published in 2011 in the scientific journal PLoS ONE concluded that since 1950, the adult bluefin population has declined by 83 percent in the western Atlantic and by 67 percent in the eastern Atlantic.


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