The speed of Europe's Atlantic bluefin tuna recovery stunned even the scientists monitoring it. Once proper controls were in place, populations bounced back faster than anyone expected.
Tristan Rouyer leads EU projects that track bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean using electronic tags and aerial surveys. His research helps set fishing quotas and other rules that have turned the species from an overfishing cautionary tale into a success story for sustainable management.
The tuna crisis of the 1990s and early 2000s seemed overwhelming. “At that time, we were fishing bluefin tuna, small and large alike, across practically its entire distribution area,” Rouyer explains. “Scientific advice wasn’t followed, nothing was put in place, so the stock was in very poor condition.”
Rouyer doesn’t go so far as to use the term “extinction”, noting that tuna reproduce too quickly for complete disappearance. “We can’t really drive a tuna stock that reproduces so fast to extinction. We had proof of this with what happened afterwards.”
The turnaround came with ICCAT’s multiannual recovery plan in 2007. “It was a plan that, through several measures, reduced overall catches. But most importantly, truly drastic control was put in place, and all boats fishing bluefin tuna were subjected to this control at sea and at landing.”
The results were swift. “Very quickly, we saw the first effects in the stock assessments of 2012. Then in 2014, we saw the stock bounce back extremely fast,” Rouyer notes. “Biomass estimates — a very strong indicator for us, the quantity of breeding fish we estimate to be in the water — completely took off.”
Today, tuna fishing operates in an entirely different context from the 1990s — particularly large-scale industrial fishing, which now targets bigger fish to meet market demand. “We hardly exploit fish under five or six years old anymore. All those small fish we used to catch — 10, 20, 30-kilo fish — we now let grow, and catch them later when they’re 200–300 kilos. What interests the market isn’t necessarily small fish anymore, it’s mainly the larger fish.”
This shift from quantity to quality has proven both economically viable and environmentally sustainable, offering hope for similar recoveries worldwide.
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