ANOTHER LIFE: Just as Ireland has taken the plunge into the ocean, with a huge state investment in marine research, the news grows ever worse about how badly the seas have been plundered, writes Michael Viney.
Even as Ireland fought in May for its share of Atlantic fisheries, the cover story in Nature was that the big fish of the oceans - from the cod, groupers and great flatfish of the continental shelves to the sharks, marlin, tuna and swordfish of the deeps - have fallen by a shocking 90 per cent in only 50 years. These fish are the ocean's predators and their loss is bound to have a huge, unpredictable impact on the marine ecosystem.
Marlin, swordfish and tuna, the fighting fish of Hemingway stories, may seem remote from Irish waters. But the appearance of Japanese trawlers, long-lining for bluefin tuna off our west coast, was a revelation of the mid-1990s. As its prices soared Japanese fleets pursued the bluefin further and further across the globe to satisfy sushi restaurants.
Then, last summer, an astonishing photograph appeared in this newspaper - a 10-foot, 660 lb bluefin tuna, caught 25 miles west of Cleggan by a Connemara sea angler. In April, Bord Iascaigh Mhara and the Marine Institute held a seminar for the growing number of charter skippers joining the new "big game" angling fishery.
Learning about the tuna's feeding and migration habits, the skippers were unanimously in favour of a policy of catch-and-release. They formed a body of licensed operators, to ensure that all anglers would be supervised in the safe return of the fish to the sea.
While the bluefin's much smaller cousin, the albacore tuna, already supports a small trawler fishery off our south-west coast, the appearance of shoals of bluefin off the Donegal coast in the mid-1980s fired the enthusiasm of Adrian Molloy of Kilcar, now acknowledged as Ireland's leading tuna catcher. Working with other Donegal fishermen, he took time to develop patient strategies and techniques for capture. The first success came in September 2000, when Alan Glanville of Waterford caught a 350lb bluefin in Donegal Bay. Last summer, Molloy himself set the record with a spectacular fish of 968lb. It is not, however, among the photographs of Donegal Bay tuna, hung by their tails and dwarfing the anglers beside them, that illustrate his website, www.tunacharters.ie. How do these pictures square with his offer of charter "on the basis of catch and release only"?
The images of dead tuna have brought him, as he says, "a lot of flak" - but also plenty of clients to pay €700-a-day to stalk bluefin in his high-speed launch, Naomh Cartha. "Without the proof," he says candidly, "no-one would have believed in the fishery. I do regret killing bluefin and have no desire to kill any in the future. Now it is time to move on and conserve them." He is, indeed, the first Irish charter skipper to have tagged and released bluefin under the "Tag-A-Giant" scheme directed from the US, where the tuna are in sharp decline. There are bluefin populations on both sides of the Atlantic and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) has been setting its catch quotas in the belief that these remain separate. But a new study, using electronic tags on the fish and satellite recovery of data from mid-ocean, finds that up to 30% of the bluefin routinely cross the half-way mark. Indeed, some fish were found to have crossed the Atlantic at least three times, taking about 40 days each way.
For the "European" population, the spawning grounds are in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic to the west of Spain and Portugal (Spain alone has an annual quota of 23,000 tonnes). Many of the young fish migrate north, arriving off Co Donegal at the end of July and remaining in northern waters until late-autumn. But another migration route takes them across to the Caribbean and up the North American coast, harassed for much of the way by sport fishermen.
The bluefin can live 20 years and weigh up to 1,500 lb. Its heroic migrations are almost an inbuilt need. It's a warm-blooded fish with a great thirst for oxygen, so it has to swim fast and constantly to drive water over its gills. Its powerful muscles can generate extraordinary bursts of speed - well over 40 m.p.h. - but they also drive the constant quest for food.
An angler's battle with a bluefin can take hours and a fish may sometimes die "on the hook" and suddenly become worth up to €5,000. Catch-and-release, perhaps with a wobbly video to prove it, may have to be the new test of sporting honour.