I am so happy that you tuned into this episode because it's not every day that I get to talk about a conservation success story. There have been many conservation success
stories over the period of marine conservation. However, it's not often that we get these wins and today we're going to be talking about the pacific bluefin tuna because there's been a huge international coordinated effort to bring the species back from the brink of extinction to something that could actually be seen as a population that is growing and we've actually hit that day there's been a recent stock assessment that shows that there's been a huge increase in the number of female Pacific
bluefin tuna that can have reproductive success, and it shows that we can actually turn a lot of tuna species around from bad management in the past very quickly. In fact, 10 years earlier than we expected for this Pacific bluefin tuna. talk about this conservation success story, what happened, why it became such a story, and what happened really to understand that, hey, this species was in trouble. We're gonna talk about that on
today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lewin and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean
by taking action. And today we're going to be talking about that action taking by government and by a number of governments, international governments. Now, when we talk about the Pacific tuna, the bluefin tuna, we talk about a species that goes across borders. This is not a species that just understands that there are U.S., Canadian, and international borders. They stay within those national boundaries so that they can get better protected. No, no, no, no. This is
a species that goes, it starts off in the Sea of Japan. all the way in between japan and the philippines where they're where they're bred and they're born and then they come over to like the baja california mexico area and then they go back after a year and where they feed and stuff and go back for six six thousand mile trek across the pacific and they do it in like 55 days because they're incredible swimmers And it's great to see a species like this that
is highly sought after for food rebound the way it has. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. It's going to be the focus. Because I came across this article on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. So if you ever want to hit me up on LinkedIn, please do so. I came across this article. It's a LinkedIn article by Jamie Gibbon, who is a manager of international fisheries
at the Pew Charitable Trust. And it caught my eye because he talks about the Pacific bluefin tuna, a decade-long conservation success. And he links to another NOAA article that talks about how it went from overfish to a sustainable success
story. But Jamie's talk he starts off his article really in an interesting way he talks about like how working in conservation can sometimes feel like an endless slog filled with both victories and frustrating setbacks and focusing on international fisheries which have been doing for over which he's been doing for over a decade can
make everything feel like it's more drawn out. High seas fisheries are very valuable, worth tens of billions of dollars a year, and so there's a constant pressure to increase the amount of fish that can be caught, but management decisions are usually only made once a year. So if the progress isn't met after that one year, you have to wait an entire 12-month cycle to get your management priorities in place for the next year, and if it's not in there, It's not great. So that can help
build overfish stocks. Tuna and sharks grow relatively slowly and live a relatively long time. So recovery can feel like it takes forever. But that's why this is interesting, because back in 2012, as Jamie reports, a scientific report showed that the population of Pacific bluefin tuna had been decimated by overfishing, which the stock dropped over 96% from its historic high. But that didn't stop a Japanese sushi chain from buying the bluefin tuna caught the next year for $1.7 million
in a celebratory auction. You gotta remember that this species is large. When you get one particular species, they could weigh up to 1,000 pounds. And they're huge, they're like 10 feet in length. So they are big species, they are big fish. So buying something for $1.7 million is a huge, huge win. So with that decision, though, everything was going wrong for the species, showing that the
money was outweighing the need for conservation. And in fact, with a lot of tuna species, the imminent decision or the imminent likelihood of you know, these species going extinct, that could go extinct, kind of increase their value of each individual species that's caught, or each individual of that species that's caught. You know, so a lot of places, a lot of corporations would catch these tuna, freeze them for a long time, for like 20 years or so, and sell them down
the line when they know that they're gonna be extinct for more money. It's just an investment for a lot of these corporations. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch End of the Line, It is an impeccable documentary that is narrated by Ted Danson, who's involved with Oceana, and they talk about the tuna industry in general, and you get a feel for what the tuna industry goes through in Europe, in the Mediterranean, in