Please don’t disappear, tuna

Like cows or chickens, tuna seems like something that’ll always be around. Tuna sandwich for lunch, sashimi for dinner. That could change drastically in the next five years.

Two of the three species of bluefin tuna make up a large portion of the tuna we eat (other species include albacore, yellowfin and bigeye), and it’s being fished at unsustainable levels. Last week, the World Wildlife Foundation announced that Atlantic bluefin tuna could be completely wiped out by 2012 — just three years from now. Its relative, the southern bluefish tuna, is listed as critically endangered and Pacific bluefin tuna is thought to be not far behind.

The WWF said the only thing that can save the Atlantic bluefin is “a complete halt to fishing in May and June, when the fish swim to the Mediterranean to spawn.” But those two months are the tuna fishing season, meaning that the WWF is asking fishermen to not catch any this year.

Tuna farming isn’t the answer, because tuna are not really farmed. They’re just caught, as this article on tuna fishing explains. “Live tuna are captured in large nets, towed to an offshore pen and fattened up to get the oil content required for the Japanese market. Approximately 10 percent of the catch will die during the towing process.”

If bluefin is wiped out, tuna in a can would still exist — it’s made of a mixture of the smaller and cheaper tunas like albacore — and high-end tuna items like sushi, sashimi, tuna steaks would most likely move from bluefin to ahi tuna, another name for the yellowfin. But it’s a stop-gap. While neither albacore nor yellowfin is endangered, it is not clear whether they’re being overfished.

If they do disappear in 20 years, then bluefish tuna is going to look more like the canary in the coal mine than the chicken of the sea.