Word: small
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...frozen fish on the block that morning. At Tsukiji, the world's most famous fish market, tuna are sold at prices equivalent to Ivy League educations. In one of hundreds of stalls, wholesaler Keisuke Morishima dismantles a fresh 271-lb. (123 kg) bluefin snared off Oma, a small Japanese town. Bluefin can live for decades, growing more than 10 ft. (3 m) long, weighing up to 1,500 lb. (680 kg), and with enough muscle to propel them at 40 m.p.h. (65 km/h). Throwing his weight into the fish as he makes a cut, Morishima is philosophical. "Some think...
...material is mostly skipjack, a small, unglamorous tuna that makes up about 60% of the world's tuna catch. Of the main commercial species, bluefin, yellowfin and bigeye tuna are primarily sold to the sashimi market; skipjack and albacore land in cans. Over half the skipjack caught each year come from the waters in the western and central Pacific, and while skipjack in the region are officially plentiful, according to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) that keeps track of them, talk to anyone in General Santos and you'll hear otherwise. Supplies of fresh, local skipjack dropped...
...General Santos and ports like it, when the fish start to go, everyone loses: the boat owners, the cannery workers, the exporters, the porters, the truck drivers. As the day winds down at the port, John Heitz walks between rows of small, unsold yellowfin that look, and smell, like they have seen better days. After the good ones go early in the morning, thousands of fish like these are left over, caught too young to have been given a chance to spawn and too far away to get back to dock in time to sell for a good price...
...Some are further along. In 2002, Japan's Kinki University successfully bred and raised bluefin in pens and is now selling small amounts of the farmed fish. This year, Clean Seas, an Australian fishing company, got its southern bluefin living in a land-based tank to spawn eggs that were raised to be fingerlings - a breakthrough in the growth cycle. The success was so unexpected that Clean Seas had to leave all but a few of the young fish to die; there wasn't enough room to let them grow...
...General Santos, people do respect the tuna. John Heitz points to a few men hauling yellowfin through the water from small wooden boats. "This is one of the few handline fisheries in the world," Heitz says. It's not flashy, but it follows the rules, pays the bills and, over time, it will keep these great animals in the water. "By eating a certain product, you're part of the problem, or part of the solution." Heitz wants to be on the solution side. Once, when he was scuba-diving off General Santos' coast, two yellowfin torpedoed past...