Page 221 - KATE_JOHNSTON_2017

several tonnarotti and rais from the Portoscuso and La Punta traps with a goal to tag 200

tuna. I visited the team at the Portoscuso trap on the Sunday following the transfer. Rais

75
Etero , a few tonnarotti and university staff (3-4) including Piero Addis, gathered on a boat

in the trap. Some members of the crew were already in the water and using rifles to shoot the

spaghetti tags into the tuna. The goal of tagging 200 fish had proved difficult over the week

due to the strong current. In the end the team could only tag a few and had to come back the

next day. Even at the Isola Piana tonnara the day before, tonnarotto Golialdo said, they had

only managed to tag three due to the weather conditions.

While the traps have been particularly important for tuna research since the 1990s and

programs such as the tagging program have accelerated recently, tuna research in the

Mediterranean has a long history. The history of observation and historical recording of tuna

biology, ethology and migration is an epistemological lineage that is part of fishery tuna

science as well as fisher tuna knowledge. This point disrupts the notion of traditional

knowledge by highlighting a historical lineage, which cannot be easily separated from current

practices (by both scientist or fishers) of observing and knowing tuna. We could say that a

scientific inquiry predates the discipline of fishery science itself. For example, Aristotle,

Oppian and Pliny the Elder all mention tuna and a trap structure similar to the tonnara

(Majkowski 2007, p. 7). In an ICCAT publication, which is the most comprehensive

bibliography of research papers about tuna and the trap fishery, Di Natale and Indrissi

suggests that literature on tuna traps goes back 26 centuries (2012, p. 175). Although not

complete, ICCAT’s bibliography includes 1236 titles in many different languages. The

majority (55.4% of the total) of papers relate to ‘fishery issues’ (2012, p. 176). There are

about 11.7% of papers that deal with bluefin biology and about 6.9% that deal with tuna

migration or oscillating occurrences. There are 10.9% that deal with socio-economic issues,

and 6.9% that deal with rules, regulation, laws or disputes. Most of the disputes, especially

209