Word: tuna
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...endangered southern bluefin tuna, prized in Japan for its texture and taste as sushi and sashimi, that in-the-mood feeling happens in only one place: the warm waters of the Indian Ocean south of Java, Indonesia. But Stehr, a German immigrant who has built a seafood empire worth around $250 million, claims to be close to changing that. He's convinced he can sate the voracious international appetite for the oily, red flesh of southern bluefin without putting more pressure on diminishing wild stocks, now estimated to be less than 10% of their 1960 numbers...
...Through his company Clean Seas Tuna, the former French Legionnaire and seaman has engaged fish-breeding experts to create just the ambience to get southern bluefin feeling frisky...
...kind of fishy virtual reality, bringing the Indian Ocean indoors to a hatchery at the hamlet of Arno Bay, 120 km north of Port Lincoln, South Australia. In a breakthrough announced in March, Clean Seas claimed a world first by collecting fertilized eggs from breeding stock - about 20 tuna weighing 160 kg apiece and kept in a giant indoor tank. Sleek, dark shapes with a line of tiny bright-yellow fins down their back, they circle endlessly, apparently convinced they have traveled far to the north, to their spawning grounds. It may be fall outside, with a sea temperature...
...Tuna is an ocean fish. They don't like to be confined," Stehr says in a still-strong German accent. "That's how you gotta keep it." The fish are persuaded they're on a long journey by changes in light, temperature and current. Without leaving the tank, they swim out of the Australian Bight, south over the continental shelf and then west and north, around Western Australia and up to their spawning grounds near the Timor Sea. They've now spawned three times and produced eggs and larvae. The next step is to feed the millions of larvae...
...Some in the tuna industry are deeply skeptical that Clean Seas will succeed. Even if it does, they doubt the fish it produces will fetch a high enough price to make the operation pay. The naysayers - those who spoke to TIME chose to remain anonymous - are wrong, argues Peter Dundas-Smith, chairman of the Australian Seafood Cooperative Research Centre, a government-industry joint venture...