EU Seiners Off Africa Blamed For Loss Yellowfin Catches In USAff
5 January 2012
Global Source: The Post and Courier
An ocean is just a big fish bowl for a restless swimmer like a yellowfin tuna.
They’re known to follow the Gulf Stream all along the East Coast and cross the ocean as juveniles. So it’s not unheard of that a yellowfin tagged in the Bahamas would show up 10 years later off West Africa.
But it’s remarkable and alarming.
Remarkable, because the tag recently recovered by S.C. Natural Resources is the first one to be returned among more than 150 the agency has disbursed since 1974 that were attached to yellowfin. It went into the water in 2001 off Cat Island, Bahamas, on a young tuna weighing 15 pounds. It came back out last year off Mauritania as a geriatric, with the fish nearly 6 feet long and weighing almost 200 pounds, according to DNR biologists.
Alarming, because tuna is one of those valuable food fish of which its stocks are being raided.
EU flagged purse seiner vessels from as far as the Indian Ocean have moved recently to net tuna in those African Atlantic waters where the yellowfin move in winter; the catch there is poorly monitored and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas says unreported catches are large and increasing.
U.S tuna anglers largely blame overfishing in those waters for the virtual disappearance of the yellowfin in the Gulf Stream here.
The tag recovery “is pretty impressive, but I guess it’ pretty disturbing too,†said American Ben Polk, of Charleston-based Jabez Charters, one of the charter captains who goes after deep sea catches like tuna. “(West Africa) is where they are being netted.â€
Robert Wiggers, the DNR fisheries biologist who handles the tagging program, is flat out amazed that a tag implanted in 15-pound fish was recovered from a creature more than 10 times that size.
“The growth of that fish is tremendous,†he said. But it was recovered by a research observer aboard a commercial longline boat. In other words, the fish is long gone. “We might not even have gotten (the tag recovery) reported if it weren’t for the observer,†he said. Most tag reports come from recreational anglers, not commercial boats.
The tag gives anglers in this region a good local picture of the international problems they face, said Don Hammond. Hammond runs Cooperative Science Services, a fishing research firm. He previously worked with DNR, and was part of the tagging program.
“The bottom line is that regulations placed on U.S. fishermen will have little impact on the health of ‘our’ fish stock as long as European and African nations allow unregulated commercial fishing in the eastern North Atlantic,†he said.
Few if any yellowfin are caught offshore the Lowcountry anymore. In 2010, only four were landed by charter boats and none in the statewide Governor’s Cup tournament, where only one has been weighed in the past three years. Polk advertises yellowfin tuna as a catch on his website, but takes customers to the Bahamas for them.
“People call for yellowfin, I tell them, no, not here,†he said.
Not so long ago, it was very different. In the late 1970s, when annual catches weren’t any better than today, big yellowfin started turning up, a lot of them, seemingly out of nowhere.
More were caught during the Governor’s Cup than the ubiquitous dolphin.
“They just showed up one year and they were so thick that was about all you could catch,†Polk said.
The state record yellowfin catch went from 36 pounds to 240 pounds by 1979. But that record stands today. Relentless fishing during the 1980s and 1990s gradually thinned out the big ones and then the stock all together. As recently as 2001, charter boats reported more than 1,000 landed. Then the bottom fell out.
“I just remember thinking, ‘Next year will be better. Next year will be better,’†Polk said.
Nowadays, yellowfin are caught off the Outer Banks and the Bahamas, where the Gulf Stream passes closer to shore. Incongruously, they still can be caught on the far side of the Gulf Stream, far out to sea.
Hammond thinks the species was pushed into the South Atlantic Bight, the coastal waters, when large numbers scattered out of the Gulf of Mexico because of fishing pressure, and crowded the core habitat across the Gulf Stream. When fishing pressure here diminished the overflow fish, the survivors fell back to that core habitat.
The African fishing pressure means the yellowfin can’t be expected to come back in anytime soon.
“Fish do learn and they will learn to avoid fishing pressure,†Hammond said. “We pretty well know where they’ve gone: to the fish market.â€
