Most of the US restaurants sell a bluefin tuna dubbed Kindai, farmed from hatched eggs in Japan as the result of a university laboratory’s efforts to ease diners’ consciences. Though the product is not fully sustainable, it underscores how fish suppliers and academic innovators are seeking to satisfy consumer demand without wiping out wild populations altogether.
According to the figures among the four bluefin populations worldwide, the number of Mediterranean bluefin has plummeted by more than half since the 1950s, and the Gulf of Mexico population is less than 20 percent of its 1970 size. Continued fishing of bluefin in the Mediterranean and incidental bycatch in the Gulf have raised the prospect that the species could go commercially extinct.
It is said that the Kindai bluefin represent what a handful of researchers say is a third way. Scientists at Japan’s Kinki University and Australia’s Clean Seas Tuna Ltd., a commercial operation, have produced the Kindai from hatched eggs rather than captured juveniles. Clean Seas, which is consulting with Kinki, has yet to start marketing its fish, but it reported this month that its separate brood stock of bluefin from the Southern Ocean have started spawning.
Many environmentalists have encouraged the efforts, saying they may represent the best chance of staving off the tuna’s extinction. Michael Sutton, who directs the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Center for the Future of the Oceans, informed that they can’t seem to stop overfishing bluefin, so captive breeding may be our only hope of saving both the species and the market.
