According to the authority a bluefin tuna weighing more than 500 kilograms caught off the coast, which was the 1,000th fish to be fitted with a tracking tag that will help collect data intended to improve the health of the species. It is said that the tuna was caught and released in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and measured three metres in length. It was tagged by a scientific team from the Tag-A-Giant (TAG) campaign of Stanford University, Dalhousie University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, working with fishermen from Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.
Barbara Block, the Stanford University professor who leads the team, told that there is no fish more majestic, more capable of travelling than the giant bluefin tuna, and it’s a huge mystery where it goes. It is said that the TAG team began tagging bluefin tuna in 1996 off of North Carolina, and it has travelled from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico and from Ireland to Spain.
Block informed that bluefin tuna is the most lucrative and in-demand fish in the world and the species is now under threat. She opined that while conservation efforts are underway in North America, overfishing in Europe continues. She told that the data putting on the table from the tags help better understand how the North American waters, the tuna that are caught, relate to the tuna in the European waters.
It is observed that the tagging data helps identify how populations of bluefin tuna use the North Atlantic, revealing information about physiology, migratory patterns and population structure. TAG data has also helped to uncover where, when and how bluefin tuna spawn, at what age they mature, and are helping to increase the accuracy of population estimates for Atlantic bluefin tuna.
