mrmoshe Posted August 5, 2007 Posted August 5, 2007 Another long read..sorry. Grab another 1000lb Bluefins WOW!! Tuna Wars: The ruthless tuna pirates who are driving these majestic creatures to extinction The pilot had spotted something. Banking sharply to the right and diving to around 500ft above the Mediterranean, his relaxed air changed as he flew the two-seater Cessna towards what looked like a giant ocean-going animal pen. Swooping as low as possible, the pilot, a veteran of countless flights over international waters, opens the aircraft window and shouts: "There! Look! Below you! Amazing! It's absolutely bloody amazing..." Peering through the wind and haze, I could make out massive, muscular black shapes swimming in fast, powerful circles. And the occasional glint of brilliant silver as one of the giants twisted and turned, flashing its huge belly beneath the waves. Coralled inside a giant net attached to orange floats, which were being tossed around by a fierce wind off the Maltese coast, these creatures were bluefin tuna - awesome, highly-strung predators regarded as one of the great wonders of the oceanic world. Capable of accelerating faster than a Porsche and weighing more than a ton, the bluefin had recently streamed from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar, following ancient migration routes to their traditional spawning grounds off the North African coast. But these bluefin hadn't made it. After rising to the surface to breed and let the richer, warmer waters incubate their fertilised eggs, aircraft patrolling the seas had noticed the tell-tale signs of a disturbance. Operating illegally from airfields in Malta, Libya and Croatia, these rogue pilots call in the coordinates of the tuna shoals to the captains of more than 200 hi-tech boats waiting below. Whoever gets to the tuna first, claims the biggest prize in fishing history. For this is no ordinary catch. Astonishingly, each haul can be worth up to £10 million. Small wonder, then, that these traditional fishing grounds have become something akin to a battle zone with allegations of Mafia involvement, gunfights between fishermen and stories of rival boats ramming each others' nets. As we shall see, there are suggestions that the tuna boats are involved in people-smuggling from Africa. There are environmental concerns, too. Investigators claim that £ 2.5 billion of tuna has been illegally caught in a three-year period, decimating wild stocks. So what is the truth about this decidedly murky business? Revered throughout the ages and lauded in Mediterranean art, folklore and worship, the bluefin tuna - or mighty Thunnus thynnus - spotted from our aircraft will not been dispatched immediately for market. Although the water will turn red with their blood soon enough. After being captured by giant "purse-seine" nets wider than a football pitch, the fish are transferred into cages and towed by tugs at a speed of one nautical mile an hour. Their destination? Controversial new offshore tuna "ranches", which are springing up throughout the Mediterranean to cater for our increasing appetite for fresh tuna steaks and sushi. Only at the end of October, when they are big enough to command top prices at restaurants in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo, will the tuna be herded into a corner of the net and shot in the head, before being carefully butchered and exported. To the horror of environmentalists and the jubilation of a new generation of "tuna millionaires", this controversial method of "ranching" - where wild fish are caught alive and raised by "farmers" - is in full flight throughout the Mediterranean this summer. Backed by millions of pounds in EU grants, the supporters of tuna ranching claim that it is an evolutionary breakthrough for humanity - as potentially life-changing as our first successful attempts to domesticate wild animals thousands of years ago. For while some species of fish - such as salmon - can be hatched from eggs in the laboratory and raised on special farms dotted around estuaries and lochs of Britain and abroad, tuna cannot be artificially reared. They have to be caught in the wild. Tuna ranching has made it possible to gather huge numbers of adolescent fish, drag them hundreds of miles across the seas, and then fatten them up by hand on the "ranches" to increase their value and ensure a regular supply for the international markets. For the moment, these ranchers are supposed to limit themselves to catching 29,000 tons a year in order to help conserve wild stocks. That's the legal quota - but environmentalists claim the true figure is almost double. Groups such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), as well as leading maritime scientists, now fear that ranching will spell the end for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean - and that, when they die out within a matter of years, the fragile eco-systems of the sea will be damaged for ever. The row over bluefin, which is expected to intensify next month with a flurry of specialist reports predicting the extinction of the species, also poses questions about the ethical choices all consumers increasingly have to make. Tuna fishermen have already been criticised for using inhumane lures on long lines, which seabirds like the rare albatross mistake for fish and then drown after being hooked through the beak. All this raises the question of whether we should even be eating tuna at all. Environmental experts think not. Calling for an international boycott of bluefin tuna as well as the immediate suspension of tuna ranching activities, they have branded the new tuna fishermen "pirates". They say they are breaking quotas and illegally plundering thousands of tons of fish - many of them undersize and immature. "The time to act is now - or it will be too late," said Dr Sergi Tudela, WWF Mediterranean Head of Fisheries. "Bluefin tuna is near ecological and commercial extinction.The stock in the past few years has deteriorated so much that only measures to protect both juvenile and adult fish have the potential to initiate recovery." Wary of these claims of ecological catastrophe and reeling from allegations of criminal involvement, tuna ranching is certainly a paranoid world. A dozen requests by the Daily Mail to visit ranches were either ignored or declined. It's an industry surrounded by secrecy and fear. In Malta last week, where local businessmen working with Japanese, Korean and Spanish partners are at the forefront of the tuna revolution, one fisherman would only agree to meet me incognito at a church in Valletta, the capital of the former British colony and Royal Navy fortress. "It's like the Mob," said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity. "This is a small island. If people find out I am talking to you, I don't know what will happen. This is big money you are talking about. A lot is at stake. They don't want people to realise what goes on out at sea." Listing examples where quotas had been flouted, fish illegally dumped and bribes paid to local fisheries' officials, the source also revealed that certain unscrupulous skippers had taken cash in return for letting illegal African refugees swim out to the cages and be towed into European ports, hidden among tuna. But for Joe and Saviour Caruana, a father-and-son team of Maltese fishermen, the invention of tuna ranching, which they carry out legally, has saved them. The family business was about to go bankrupt when, in 2000, Joe first heard stories about the vast sums to be made from ranching. It was in Port Lincoln, a small, depressed fishing community in Southern Australia, that the tunaranching business was pioneered. Introduced as an experiment in the late 1990s, its success was instantaneous, with demand from Japanese markets overwhelming. By last year, less than a decade after starting, Port Lincoln had 1,300 tuna farms - and the highest number of millionaires anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Once poverty-stricken, the town is now dotted with opulent villas, upmarket restaurants and boutique shops. Now the Caruana family hope to copy that success in the Mediterranean. Today, two kilometres out at sea, they have a stock of caged fish worth £5 million, waiting to get fat enough for market. "We are very nervous," said Joe Caruana, who has already sold his entire stock of this year's tuna to a Japanese multinational - before he had even caught them. "A lot of bad things get said about tuna ranching, but we have got nothing to hide. You can see everything. Everything is business - and it would be very bad for our business if we did anything to damage our stocks." To prove his point, Mr Caruana made me an offer that I could not refuse: the chance to swim with the fishes. "Come and see for yourself," he said. "Our fish are clean, well looked after and well-fed. "These fish are very important to us. We are saving the tuna by catching them alive. Otherwise, they would just be killed and destroyed." After being taken by boat to massive nets moored off the south of the island, I lowered myself into the water where the biggest fish were being whipped into a frenzy by the release of thousands of fresh mackerel that are fed to them by the Caruanas - three times a day. Tuna are fortunate to eat once a week in the wild. It's easy to see why marine enthusiasts claim that, if these fish were not hidden beneath the waves, they would be a protected species and ranked as a spectacle on a par with elephants, leopards and rhino if they lived on land. They were a glorious spectacle - soaring past me at speeds of up to 40mph were tuna 10ft long and 5ft wide. Their agility was breathtaking. "Don't worry. They won't crash into you," said Saviour. "They have amazing navigation systems. They locate prey with their sonar, but close in using their eyes." In the waters around me, which were littered with floating scales and a fishy-smelling slick, the biggest tuna weighed 1,000lb. Selling for about £12 a kilo, there was £1 million worth of fish in each cage. So valuable is the stock that they are looked after round-the-clock by divers. Some ranchers also station armed guards on boats nearby, to scare off tuna rustlers and environmental activists intent on releasing them back into the wild. Joe Caruana, who employs 60 people, is scathing about the environmental groups who want to put him out of business. "Where do these green people get their boats with big engines and the money for all their specialists and their reports?" he asked. "They're in business, like the rest of us, and they're attacking us to make sure their backers know they are busy earning their money." His son, Saviour, 24, who is studying for a PhD in marine biology at Stirling University, accepted there are unscrupulous people in the ranching business. He revealed how one notorious captain illegally killed 120 tons of tuna a couple of weeks ago after discovering a fault with his cages. He preferred the fish to die rather than sell them to another rival boat equipped with a cage. But Saviour insists his family operate ethically. "Yes, there are problems and the stocks of fish are probably getting exhausted. But most of the things you hear are exaggerated. We need to provide high-quality, well-kept fish and that's what we do." Most casualties occur when the fish are caught by the boats after being located by aircraft. Like racehorses, the tuna are highly agile and intelligent, but suffer greatly from stress caused by any sudden change in their environment. To ensure the tuna do not get frightened, which can ruin the flesh through the secretion of stress hormones, the nets are towed from the hunting grounds at slow speeds in an attempt to minimise losses. The towing stage can take up to a month, but the crews keep busy. Divers plunge into the moving cages every couple of hours, checking for dead fish or for dolphins, porpoises, whales, turtles and sharks which get tangled up in the nets. Predators, including great white sharks, are attracted by the blood if the dead are not quickly removed. Fishermen from many countries are now getting in on the act. Unaffected by EU regulations, monitors and quotas, Libya is the latest, with local Maltese media reports claiming that Colonel Gaddafi's son is overseeing the country's move into tuna ranching, a charge he denies. All this, say environmentalists, has been a disaster for the Mediterranean's ecosystem, decimating stocks not only of tuna, but of other species that must be harvested to feed them: the tuna need 25 kilos of fish to gain just one kilo in weight. But Joe Caruana snorts with derision. "These tuna would have to eat fish anyway, we're not doing anything they wouldn't be doing in the wild. All these things get exaggerated. "Besides, beef and chicken are often reared on fish meal. Why don't you say we shouldn't eat meat because of damage to the fish stock?" One thing is certain: the tuna in Joseph and Saviour's cages off Malta will die soon. Divers will enter the water with harpoon guns and herd the giant fish into a corner to be dispatched. Those who can make a "clean" shot are paid the highest rates (the flesh of tuna taints and becomes worthless if the fish is not killed quickly). And so 600 more bluefin will be gone from the Med for good. With some prime specimens fetching up to £30,000 each, the harvest will help Mr Caruana become one of the new tunaranching barons of the Med. But at what price for this most glorious species?
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