World Atlas Of Tuna Catch Methods Shows Purse Seiner Supremacy
By Atuna
The Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations (FAO) Fisheries department has recently made available a series of statistics about tuna catches and farming, which included an interactive atlas of tuna catches by the most common tuna gears: longine, pole and line and purse seine.
The species included were albacore, Atlantic, Pacific and Southern bluefin tuna, bigeye, skipjack and yellowfin. The most recent information dates from 2007, and it certainly shows -in terms of volume- how limited pole and line and even longline catches are compared to purse seiner tuna catches.
According to the map, most of the tuna purse seining activities concentrate around the Equator and they are highly concentrated in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean. Several catching areas represented catches over 80.000 tons a year.
Longline tuna fishing is spread all over the tropics and the pressure is below one thousand tons (yearly) in most areas. Some concentrated activities could be found off the coast of Somalia and around Ghana, Nigeria and Angola.
The atlas of pole and line tuna fishing can be worrisome to environmental organizations supporting this fishing method as the future of sustainable tuna sourcing. Even though the activity was concentrated in some areas with relative strong fishing pressure, the total display confirms that the method is not a solid tendency.
However, the data may not be as precise as we expect at least for pole and line tuna fishing, since there are no indications of activity in the Maldives (in the Indian Ocean) and the country’s tuna industry is known by its “catch one by one†logo and strong pole and line fishing.
According to FAO, total tuna catches for the same period - 2007 - of each gear type was:
Pole and line: 454.540 MT
Longine: 587.293 MT
Purse Seiner: 2.607.221 MT
