The Atlantic bluefin tuna is an amazing creature. A warm-blooded fish, it accelerates faster than a Porsche and covers thousands of kilometres in its lifetime.
But the fish, which swims into the Mediterranean each year to reproduce, is facing a crisis. Prized for sushi in Japan and across the world, the high demand for this valuable fish has led to huge illegal industrial overfishing. This has been fuelled in turn by the massive expansion of tuna farms in the Mediterranean in the last ten years, where wild tuna are caught, put in cages and fattened up for export.
If this unscrupulous fishing continues the species could be biologically and commercially extinct in a few years.
There is one last chance to save the bluefin tuna. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) is meeting this month in Croatia and will decide how to manage the fishery in the Mediterranean over the coming years.
Most of the illegal fishing of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean is by EU fleets – yet Europe’s representative at ICCAT is still resisting a strict recovery plan.
(Via WWF Passport)
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