![]() But the bluefin’s story is anything but straightforward.īluefin are the subject of a multi-million dollar industry driven to fulfill the ever-growing demand for high-end sushi in Japan, the United States, China, and Europe. If a proposal filed last May by the Center for Biological Diversity is accepted, bluefin will gain the same protection under the Endangered Species Act as the North Atlantic right whale, the Bengal tiger, and the African elephant. In recent years, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, Thunnus thynnus, has risen to fame as an icon of overfishing and the need for marine conservation. In recent years, many scientists have feared bluefin tuna were being fished to extinction, but new research suggests that the population dynamics may be more complex. No longer subject to the current’s arbitrary flows, she will swim as a highly mobile predator-but the dangers will hardly be over. With her adapted fins, her swimming will become fine-tuned she will learn the subtle art of manipulating the sea’s fluid motions. With the development of her cartoonishly large eyes, she will begin to school with other tuna larvae. At twenty-five days, she will become social. In a week, she will look like a miniature of the thousand pounders that rove the world over, foreshadowing her mature shape and stature. In the next few days she will develop the complete skeletal structure of a mature bluefin. By the end of the year they will be her main prey for now they remain her predator. Six inches long, they dwarf the tuna larvae, gulping mouthfuls of tiny crustaceans and krill. Overhead, near the surface, a school of anchovies streaks through the water. Their living and dying traces the motion of the sea in explosions of color. All around, diatoms, microscopic photosynthetic plankton, emit light as a defense when excited. A drop in salinity or a change in temperature would kill her, stunting the development of her delicate musculature, leaving her paralyzed. Her tiny body is being flushed out of the Gulf of Mexico through the Straits of Florida and into the broader Atlantic, where, with luck, she will grow to be a giant bluefin tuna.įor now, she lives as a drifter, carried on the sea’s currents. ![]() Electric impulses run down her developing spinal cord, twitching her trunk and tail side to side, side to side, in a motion that won’t stop until she dies. She is only six millimeters long, opaque, with a head larger than her body. Under the Miami skyline, beneath bits of trash collected at the margin of the Florida current, a tiny female creature struggles on a warm, moonless night in April. They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent. Now they report seeing schools of hundreds of smaller fish. ![]() Fishermen who work the Gulf of Maine say that bluefin tuna used to grow to more than a thousand pounds and travel in groups of fewer than ten.
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