Negotiators at the Kobe III meetings in La Jolla California, who collectively manage tuna fisheries in more than 91% of the world’s oceans, are being presented with a bleak picture from several recent studies.
Bruce Collette and his colleagues at the National Marine Fisheries Service Systematics Laboratory in Washington DC, conducted the first global assessment of scombrids and billfish, families that include important commercial species such as tuna, marlin and mackerel, to produce a “red list” of species according to the criteria developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Their work find that 7 of 61 species are vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered, emphasizing the precarious state of the scombrids and billfish families.
Furthering this message, Boris Worm and Derek Tittensor assessed the ranges of 13 species of tuna and billfish in their paper published late last month. They found that 9 of the 13 species had experienced a significant drop in range size since 1960, leading to a case of what Dr. Worm refers to as ‘double jeopardy’, a situation where a species is being reduced both in numbers and range, a potentially dangerous combination.
In another recent paper, Tom Polacheck of the Australian national research agency in Hobart, presents a case study of how a paper from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation submitted to a subgroup of the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission had to be pulled as a result of political pressure.
“It would be of little importance for the general provision of scientific advice in RFMOs if this was an isolated instance but it is the experience of the author that failure to respect the demarcation between political and scientific process of RFMOs is relatively common”
- Collette, B. et al. Science doi:10.1126/science.1208730 (2011).
- Worm, B. & Tittensor, D. P. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.1102353108 (2011).
- Polacheck, T. Mar. Policy doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2011.04.006 (2011).