By FELICITY BARRINGER
New York Times May 27, 2011
The Obama administration said on Friday that it had declined to grant
Endangered Species Act protections to the Atlantic bluefin tuna, whose numbers have declined precipitously because of overfishing on both sides of the ocean.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the fish, whose fatty flesh is prized by sushi aficionados, would be classified as a species of concern, however, effectively placing bluefin on a watch list as the agency awaits new data on the impact of a stricter international management regimen.
“The future of this species relies on sound international management,” said Larry Robinson, NOAA’s assistant secretary for conservation and management. The agency’s scientists are also continuing to assess the effect of last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill on bluefin spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico, officials said, and the agency will revisit its decision by early 2013.
Mr. Robinson said the bluefin tuna did not warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act because it was “not likely to become extinct.”
The decision drew sharp criticism from the ’Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group based in Arizona that filed the petition requesting endangered species protection. “The Obama administration is kowtowing to the fears of the U.S. fishing industry instead of following the science on this,” said Kieran Suckling, the center’s executive director.
Yet several other environmental groups have questioned the wisdom of unilaterally listing the bluefin tuna as an endangered species, saying that coordinated international action is far preferable.
Last year the United States backed an international effort to have the Atlantic bluefin protected under the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, but the move was blocked by aggressive lobbying by Japan, where a single adult fish, weighing more than 300 pounds and measuring more than six feet long, can be sold for thousands of dollars.
Asked to reconcile Friday’s decision with the push for a listing by the convention, known as Cites (pronounced SIGH-tees), Eric Schwaab, assistant administrator for NOAA’s fisheries service, said that another global body, the
International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or Iccat, had established stricter fishing quotas and more rigorous monitoring over the last year and that his agency planned to study the results.
He added that a listing under the Endangered Species Act required a different standard from a Cites listing; under the American law, there must be compelling evidence of the likelihood of the fish’s extinction, he said.
No one disputes that the bluefin population has plummeted in recent decades. The most recent analysis of the decline, prepared last year by Iccat, found that the eastern Atlantic’s stocks of fish old enough to reproduce declined by 80 percent between 1970 and 1992 and have since fluctuated between 21 percent and 29 percent of the 1970 level.
In the western Atlantic, bluefin stocks declined more than 70 percent from 1970 through the mid-1990s, after which the "spawning stocks" remained relatively stable at the reduced levels.
Lee Crockett, director of federal fisheries policy for the
Pew Environment Group, another conservation organization, said that multilateral efforts to protect the bluefin tuna were crucial but that “international tools are not being used effectively.” Fishermen in the Mediterranean catch “twice the legal quota illegally,” he said.
Nor does the United States do enough, he added. Mr. Crockett said that additional steps were needed to protect the bluefin tuna’s spawning areas in the Gulf of Mexico and to end log-line fishing there, which causes the bluefin to be caught accidentally by commercial fishermen in pursuit of other fish.
The American fishing industry welcomed NOAA’s decision, while assigning most of the blame for overfishing to fishermen on the other side of the Atlantic. "We’re glad that the leadership paid special attention, very carefully reviewed the latest science and the latest stock assessments and recognized that Iccat has been getting the situation under control in the Mediterranean and the Eastern Atlantic,” said Rich Ruais, executive director of the
American Bluefin Tuna Association.
Overfishing in the east has affected stocks in the west, Mr. Ruais said, because the fish is wide-ranging and can swim across the Atlantic in less than two months.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/science/earth/28tuna.html
