Page 6 - Bestor_2000

Before bluefin became a commercial species in Harley-Davidsons dash under the boat, barely visi-
New England, before Japanese buyers discovered the ble until, with a flash of silver and blue, they wheel
stock, before the 747, bluefin were primarily sports around to snatch a drifting morsel.
fish, caught with fighting tackle by trophy hunters The nets, lines, and buoys are part of an
out of harbors like Montauk, Hyannis, and Kenneb- almadraba, a huge fish trap used in Spain as well as
unkport. Commercial fishers, if they caught bluefin at Sicily, Tunisia, and Morocco. The almadraba consists
all, sold them for cat food when they could and trucked of miles of nets anchored to the channel floor sus-
them to town dumps when they couldn't. Japanese pended from thousands of buoys, all laid out to cut
buyers changed all of that. Since the 1970s, commer- across the migration routes of bluefin tuna leaving
cial Atlantic bluefin tuna fisheries have been almost the strait. This almadraba remains in place for about
exclusively focused on Japanese markets like Tsukiji. six weeks in June and July to intercept tuna leaving
In New England waters, most bluefin are taken the Mediterranean after their spawning season is
one fish at a time, by rod and reel, by hand line, or over. Those tuna that lose themselves in the maze end
by harpoon-techniques of a small-scale fisher, not of up in a huge pen, roughly the size of a football field.
a factory fleet. On the European side of the Atlantic, By the end of the tuna run through the strait, about
the industry operates under entirely different condi- 200 bluefin are in the pen.
tions. Rather than rod and reel or
harpooning, the typical gear is indus-
trial-the purse seiner (a fishing ves-
u
sel closing a large net around a Japanese demand for prime bluefin tuna created a gold-
school of fish) or the long line (which
catches fish on baited hooks strung rush mentality on fishing grounds across the globe.
along lines played out for many
miles behind a swift vessel). The 1
techniques may differ from boat to boat and from Two hundred fish may not sound like a lot, but
country to country, but these fishers are all angling for if the fish survive the next six months, if the fish hit 1
a share of the same Tsukiji yen-and in many cases, their target weights, if the fish hit the market at the
some biologists argue, a share of the same tuna stock. target price, these 200 bluefin may be worth $1.6 mil-
Fishing communities often think of themselves as lion dollars. In November and December, after the
close-knit and proudly parochial; but the sudden bluefin season in New England and Canada is well
globalization of this industry has brought fishers into over, the tuna are harvested and shipped by air to
contact-and often into conflict-with customers, Tokyo in time for the end-of-the-year holiday spike
governments, regulators, and environmentalists in seafood consumption.
around the world [see sidebar on page 571. The pens, huge feed lots for tuna, are relatively
Two miles off the beach in Barbate, Spain, a huge new, but almadraba are not. A couple of miles down
maze of nets snakes several miles out into Spanish the coast from Barbate is the evocatively named set-
waters near the Strait of Gibraltar. A high-speed, tlement of Zahara de 10s Atunes (Zahara of the
Japanese-made workboat heads out to the nets. On Tunas) where Cervantes lived briefly in the late 16th
board are five Spanish hands, a Japanese supervisor, century. The centerpiece of the village is a huge stone
2,500 kilograms of frozen herring and mackerel compound that housed the men and nets of Zahara's
imported from Norway and Holland, and two Amer- almadraba in Cervantes's day, when the port was only
ican researchers. The boat is making one of its twice- a seasonally occupied tuna outpost (occupied by
daily trips to Spanish nets, which contain captured scoundrels, according to Cervantes). Along the Costa
Mediterranean tuna being raised under Japanese de la Luz, the three or four almadraba that remain
supervision for harvest and export to Tsukiji. still operate under the control of local fishing boss-
Behind the guard boats that stand watch over the es who hold the customary fishing rights, the nets, the
nets 24 hours a day, the headlands of Morocco are workers, the boats, and the locally embedded cultural
a hazy purple in the distance. Just off Barbate's capital to make the almadraba work-albeit for dis-
white cliffs to the northwest, the light at the Cape tant markets and in collaboration with small-scale
of Trafalgar blinks on and off. For 20 minutes, the Japanese fishing firms.
men toss herring and mackerel over the gunwales of Inside the Strait of Gibraltar, off the coast of
the workboat while tuna the size (and speed) of Cartagena, another series of tuna farms operates