Bluefin Tuna on the Verge of Extinction?
time.com
time.com
Other tuna species (that are usually sold in cans) seem to be doing ok.
Just to get the perspective - three bluefin species all together make just over 1% of all tuna catches:
But there is definitely a problem. A fundamental one. Overfishing is a classical "tragedy of commons" example. There are no easy solutions.
That's just P(t) - C(t) + K for P = production, C = consumption, and K = amount available at t = 0.
So for oil, we have small P, large C, large K. For tuna, we have small P, large C, small K. As such, projection estimates should rest on similar assumptions, and extinction models should be as realistic as you can get.
I agree that there are no easy solutions, but the problem is there; it's the elephant in the room, in all aspects of consumption.
(this was posted as more of a thought experiment than anything else).
I found a much better article on bluefin tuna troubles in Scientific American - indeed there are attempts to farm tuna:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=bluefin-tuna-in-peril
BTW that's also one of the reasons why I think predicting populations 40 years in advance is hard. Even for a good model assumptions can change. And for systems of nonlinear differential equations even small differences in constants can lead to widely different outcomes.
I love bluefin tuna. its delicious. knowing that i might not be able to eat it in a few years leaves me conflicted between increasing consumption for my personal enjoyment (at the cost of the burden of knowing that I'm accelerating bluefin toward its extinction) and decreasing personal consumption for the small moral victory that I at least tried to help keep a species on earth (at the cost of decreased sushi enjoyment).
If God wanted bluefin to survive, maybe He should have made them less tasty.
They fish Bluefin Tuna where I live (PEI, Canada) but it's one at a time with a rod sort of like Marlin or Swordfish. The quota here is 100 to 200 tons, I couldn't imagine 50,000 tons!