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economy, in environmental conflicts, and in food politics. Sustainability has become a

keyword mobilised to define the problems and also their solutions, through a range of

practices and technologies that determine certain tuna species as sustainable and others as

unsustainable. My research focuses on skipjack, katsuwonus pelamis, and Atlantic bluefin

tuna (hereafter referred to as Atlantic bluefin), thunnus thynnus. Skipjack and Atlantic bluefin

are illustrative of the diverse ways tuna come to matter. Skipjack is used in tinned tuna as a

sustainable alternative to yellowfin and albacore tuna, and offers an opportunity to think

through the process of rendering a fish sustainable through traceability and sustainability

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devices such as certification . Contrastingly, Atlantic bluefin offers another opportunity to

think through ways that a fish is identified as unsustainable and processes of managing it

through the framework of sustainability. The economic extremes that these two species

inhabit are striking. A tin of skipjack tuna can cost as little as $2, whereas Atlantic bluefin

sits on the other end of the economic scale. In 2014 a single 220 kilogram fish sold for $1.76

million at the famous Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, about $8,000 per kilogram or $24 for a

small piece of sashimi (Boehler 2013). Not only are they economically dissimilar but also

they are physiologically distinctive. Furthermore, because their migration paths and habits

diverge, they interact with quite different ecosystems and human communities across the

globe.

Skipjack has a high reproduction rate and commonly reaches 80cm in length and a

weight of 8-10 kilograms. It tends to live in the tropical or warm temperate waters of the

Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. The International Union for Conservation of

Nature (IUCN) characterises it as ‘fast-growing, short-lived, and very fecund’ (Collette 2011,

n.p.). These characteristics make skipjack an ideal candidate for sustainable tuna and are the

reason it is listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as of ‘least concern’ (Collette

2011, n.p.). At over 2.5 million metric tonnes in 2011, the global annual catch exceeds any

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