It is evident that the popularity of tuna grows each day from Boston to Beijing but the fishing of wild tuna to meet this demand is rapidly shrinking the global supply. In order to meet the growing demands of tuna a Hawaii company announced to build the world’s first commercial bigeye tuna farm so the masses may savor sashimi without further reducing tuna populations.
Bill Spencer, chief executive of Hawaii Oceanic Technology Inc., opined that the stocks of ocean are depleting fast and this is high time we should do something. Eco-friendly farming of one of the world’s most in-demand sushi ingredients is happening all over the world.
Hawaii Oceanic aims to build a 12-pen farm just under 3 miles off the west coast of the Big Island in two years. The farm would produce 6,000 tons of bigeye a year when fully operational, serving Hawaii, the U.S. mainland, Japan and other parts of Asia. In 2007, fishermen caught 224,921 tons of wild bigeye in the Pacific.
According to the company bigeye is the second most coveted tuna after bluefin. But bluefin has been so heavily hunted for its soft, buttery meat that the species’ population in the Atlantic and Mediterranean has plummeted more than 80 percent in 30 years. Mark Stevens, a senior program officer at the World Wildlife Fund, said that now bigeye is becoming the favorite catch. He added that in the Eastern Pacific, humans are capturing bigeye faster than the species can reproduce and replace what we eat. The situation is almost that bad in the Western Pacific.
It is told that Hawaii Oceanic plans to artificially hatch bigeye at a University of Hawaii lab in Hilo. After the fry grow, the company would take the fish to the pens, where they will be harvested when they reach 100 pounds. Peter Bridson, aquaculture manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California is concerned about how much fish Hawaii Oceanic would need to feed its bigeye.
