Going Under

We're literally eating the Pacific bluefin tuna into extinction, at least as a commercial product. And by "we" I mean wealthy Japanese.

Currently, stocks of Pacific bluefin tuna have dropped by 96% and 90% of all bluefins caught today are too young to reproduce, a true recipe for disaster. They're being over-fished because rich Japanese hooked on the stuff are willing to pay in excess of $1 million dollars for prize examples. In fact, one was recently auctioned for $1.7  million dollars.

Worse, a consortium of Japanese businessmen recently bought up all the bluefin they could and stashed them away in super-cooled storage, betting that when the fish went extinct they could name their price. This was nefarious enough but when the tsunami hit Japan it knocked out the power to the freezers and the fish were lost. We should never stop slapping those people.

The big problem is that Japan consumes over 80% of Pacific bluefin tuna so limiting visits to your local sushi palace won't help (although not eating tuna at all wouldn't hurt.) And the Japanese are, sadly, not inclined to limit their catch any time soon.

I was taught the foolishness of our ancestors for systematically wiping out species like the dodo. Do we stand by and let another one disappear just because they quietly go about their business out of our sight? At the very least share your outrage by signing the petition at forcechange.com to impose limits on tuna harvesting.

=Lefty=