Environmental Ethics, Fishing, Tuna, and Whales

The Puzzle of Tuna

Tuna is a widely available commodity in supermarkets, which often masks the decline in wild populations. Tuna are among the most valuable fish in the sea, making efficient fishing methods highly profitable but also causing ecological destruction. We will explore the tuna economy, ocean management, and ethics in economics.

Tuna sells for approximately $3.1 million.

Tuna is the name of a group of fish species.

Examples of tuna species and their conservation status:

• Southern Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus maccoyii): Critically Endangered
• Bigeye Tuna (Thunnus obesus): Vulnerable
• Albacore Tuna (Thunnus alalunga): Near Threatened
• Longtail Tuna (Thunnus tonggol): Data Deficient
• Pacific Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus orientalis): Vulnerable
• Yellowfin Tuna (Thunnus albacares): Near Threatened
• Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus): Endangered
• Blackfin Tuna (Thunnus atlanticus): Least Concern

Bluefin tuna are warm-blooded and can self-adapt their body temperatures, allowing them to tolerate a range of water temperatures across a large geographic range.

Tuna can swim fast and for a long time, achieving very long migration paths, some migrate 4,000+ miles per season!

Why Study Tuna?

Tuna are a familiar commodity and representative of the many overfishing and collateral damage crises in the world’s oceans.

A Short History of Tuna

Tuna were not valuable until the 1960s. The study of tuna enables us to look at a relatively recent exploitation to near collapse for a commercial fish species. High demand for bluefin tuna, including for Japanese sushi, and the use of enhanced fishing techniques led to ecological destruction through:

• Overfishing of bluefin fish stocks (including refrigerated tuna freighters)
• Bycatch: the accidental harvest of non-targeted marine species

Purse-Seine Fishing

Purse-seining is an economically efficient fishing method for species that school near the surface. A net encircles the school of fish, and the bottom is drawn shut like a purse. Dolphins become bycatch because they school above tuna and drown in the nets.

Tuna Ranching

Young wild tuna are captured and fattened for human consumption in captivity. Tuna caught for ranching do NOT count against legal catch quota, further depleting wild stocks. Young tuna are preferentially harvested, which puts pressure on the wild tuna populations through growth overfishing. This differs from recruitment overfishing of big, old, fat, fecund female fish (BOFFF).

Eastern Tropical Pacific Yellowfin Tuna Fishery (ETP)

Originally, pole and line fishing were used (more labor-intensive, but cotton nets were degrading in the warm waters). It became unprofitable, and ETP fisheries switched to purse-seining, increasing yellowfin harvest but leading to a great amount of dolphin mortality.

The Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) area is monitored by IATTC and AIDCP.

The Tuna-Dolphin Problem

Purse-seining increased yellowfin tuna harvest but led to a great amount of dolphin mortality – more than half a million dolphins in 1960. Dolphins school above tuna and often asphyxiate in the purse-seine nets because they cannot reach the surface to take up oxygen through their blowholes.

Viewing the tuna-dolphin problem through the lenses of markets and commodities versus ethics provides different perspectives that point to different solutions.

Governmental Legislation

The protests of environmental activists inspired the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) in 1972, prohibiting the killing, selling, importing, or exporting of marine mammals. However, the MMPA included confusing loopholes for dolphins caught in tuna fisheries, and enforcement was challenging. In 1984, still over 20,000 dolphins were killed.

Markets and Commodities

Can the free market save the resources it has depleted? Can consuming the “right” fish save our oceans?

Consumer Boycott

NGO Earth Island Institute organized a consumer boycott to pressure corporations to change their practices but did not have the desired effect until Sam LaBudde's film.

Sam LaBudde’s Film

A biology graduate working for the Earth Island Institute, LaBudde, lacking visual material for the campaign, hired on as a cook on a Panamanian fishing boat and filmed 4 months of tuna fishing and dolphin killings.

Dolphin-Safe Labels

Dolphin-safe labels represent green consumerism for dolphin-friendly tuna. However, dolphin-friendly is not necessarily ecologically sustainable.

In 2012, a US court banned the US's dolphin-safe tuna labels, calling them 'unfair' to Mexico, stating they give 'less favorable treatment' to Mexican products.

The US Congress passed a trade embargo on Mexican tuna because it “lacked dolphin-friendly methods” (but Mexico had extended their exclusive economic zones to 200 miles, cutting off the US tuna fleet). Environmental protections can be the product of geopolitical struggles as much as institutions for sustainability.

Dolphin-Safe Tuna in the UK?

Almost all canned tuna in the UK is labeled as dolphin-safe because the market is almost exclusively skipjack tuna. Skipjack tuna is not implicated in the dolphin bycatch problem of the tuna caught in the US, but what about sustainability?

Animal Rights vs. Sustainability

The dolphin-safe tuna labels were a victory for dolphins but created a wider unsolved problem of bycatch. The unsustainable harvest of tuna and other fish continues. In this case, the ethics of animal rights is more important than that of ecological sustainability.

MSC Label

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) label can be earned by meeting sustainability requirements. However, it takes money to get certified, so small companies and individual fishers are often left out. Green labels appear to favor large corporations over small producers.

Is this a case of greenwashing? Some environmental groups argue that the MSC certifies certain fish catch despite a lack of evidence for it being sustainable. Informed consumers to the rescue?

Animal Rights

Efforts in conservation tend to focus on species rather than systems or individual animals.

• Ecological ethic: okay to kill individual animals as long as the species is not threatened.
• Animal rights ethic: animals should have rights because they suffer, so any action that causes suffering is wrong. Moral extensionism involves equal consideration (not always equal treatment) of non-humans.

Some Animals Have More Rights Than Others

The emphasis on protection of individual dolphins rather than the ocean ecosystem reveals a preference for animal rights over the ecological ethic. But why is no one concerned about the rights of tuna?

Tuna as Animals Worthy of Ethical Consideration?

Public Attitudes Can Change

Moral extensionism can shift to include other species over time, as seen in the case of octopus after the Netflix series “My Octopus Teacher”.

Octopus Farming

Nueva Pescanova has proposed establishing the world's first large-scale octopus farm in the Canary Islands, aiming to produce 3,000 tons of octopus annually. This plan has sparked significant ethical debates.

• Eurogroup for Animals: Advocating for the European Union to prevent the establishment of octopus farming, emphasizing the impossibility of high-welfare farming practices for octopuses.
• Aquatic Life Institute: Working towards legislative bans on octopus farming in multiple countries, focusing on the ethical implications of farming such intelligent creatures.
• A legal ban is in place in California.

What About Whales?

Commercial Whaling

Marine mammals have historically been hunted for a wide range of products (meat, blubber, oil, bones, ivory).

• 16th to 17th century in the Gulf of St Lawrence an estimated 40,000 whales were killed.
• By the 18th century, some whale populations were severely depleted.

Technological developments allowed for more species to be hunted commercially, in more areas (up to Antarctica). The humpback population declined, and attention shifted to hunting blue, fin, and minke whales. Overproduction of oil led to the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling in 1931, which helped to stabilize oil prices BUT was still disastrous for whale populations due to competition between whaling nations.

International Whaling Commission (IWC)

The 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling aimed for “proper conservation of whale stocks […] for the orderly development of the whaling industry”. Membership was voluntary, and lack of enforcement meant whale populations continued to decline. Whaling nations under/misreported catch numbers, and whaling became uneconomic. Quotas were set for species to harvest maximum sustainable yield (MSY).

Whaling for Maximum Sustainable Yield

The problem with maximum sustainable yield is that small errors in the parameters (which are difficult to assess) can lead to overuse. Illegal hunting and flags of convenience are used to circumvent quotas.

Whaling Moratorium

In 1986, the IWC agreed to indefinitely postpone commercial whaling. Loopholes to continue commercial whaling were famously exploited by Japan for ‘scientific whaling’ and Norway registering objection to IWC.

Japan revises catch limits every six years, for example, making this the first update for both species since the country resumed commercial whaling in 2019

Animal Ethics Over Ocean Conservation

Using environmental ethics to look at the sometimes conflicting ethical standpoints can help us understand why ocean conservation lags behind marine mammal protection. Dolphins and whales are socially constructed as charismatic species with interests valued by humans, while tuna are socially constructed as just fish or just food.

The dominant ethic is that it is right to protect marine mammals from harvest but right to manage fish for harvest. This standpoint prevents a paradigm shift to more precautionary approaches to fisheries management.

Mandatory Reading

• Robbins, P., Hintz, J., Moore, S. (2014) Environment and Society, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell (Chapter 13, pp. 224-242)
• King, B. J., & Marino, L. (2019). Octopus minds must lead to octopus ethics. Animal Sentience, 4(26), 14. https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol4/iss26/14/