Japan consumes over half the worlds Bluefin Tuna
Not sure if you have read one of my earlier posts, It’s Almost ‘The End of The Line’ For Seafood, where I point out how we are overfishing our oceans and are quite literally running out of fish. Well this is kind of a continuation on that note. At a Japanese fish auction house, which sells millions of dollars of fish on any given day, a buyer paid $397,000 US for a single 342kg (754 lbs) Bluefin tuna! The highest ever paid for any fish … ever.
This is testimony to the rarity of this once abundant fish in our oceans, and only serves to outline how overfished our oceans truly are. And ya wanna know the worst part, because these fish are so prized and so valuable, some fisherman (aka poachers) will do anything and will break any law to catch them and get them to market. Now there are hard and fast rules and quotas on these fish (and most others) but the truth is most aren’t easy to enforce. So at the end of the day, these ‘fish poachers’ just catch what they want with little regard for anything or anybody.
Sadly, the Bluefin isn’t the only ‘poached’ fish, there are many others, most notably sharks, which are killed simply for their fins. Shark fin soup, an Asian delicacy, was once only reserved for the ‘well-off’, but as Asian’s wealth is increasing, so is their appetite for shark fin soup. Ten’s of millions of sharks are caught each year, simply to have their fin’s lobbed off and are tossed back into the water to die. Seriously. This is decimating the shark population the world over. And contrary to what you might think of sharks from movies like jaws, they play a very vital and important role in the worlds oceans as one of the top predators. You can read more here.
So what can you do?
It’s simple, pay attention to the sushi you eat, and how much you eat. Many endangered species of marine life became endangered as a direct result of our appetite for sushi. Let me word that a different way, our consumption of sushi is directly pushing species in the oceans to extinction. So try to eat more of the abundant fish and less of the endangered fish. Below are two ‘pocket guides’ in PDF format that you can print off and put in your wallet. They outline, in simple terms what you should and shouldn’t eat. Print them off. Follow them. Do your part.
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