Tuna Fishing in Boston... and Sea Sickness
This summer some of us at Untamed Science – Jonas Stenstrom, Haley Chamberlain and Rob Nelson decided we would do a short video about animals in the pelagic zone to help compliment some of the biomes videos they are working on with UntamedScience.com and Thewildclassroom.com. All in all, our trip was amazing except for the simple fact that we didn’t see a single tuna. The following video is a quick little update that shows some of the scenery we encountered on our day-long fishing trip.
http://blip.tv/play/geMCgfrsOwA
Tuna abundance in Boston
It is no suprise that a fishing industry that revolves around a big fish like tuna might one day not exist. If the fish are there, fishermen are going to catch them. We wondered if the fishermen in this area thought there was a decline in fish stocks like the declines we had been reading about worldwide.
As it turned out, Judd, our captain has seen an increase in the last few years in tuna catches. While this might be a small increase from a century long decline, we found it unusual. Reports on the web show that tuna are declining to the edge of extinction. Some scientists predict that tuna might go extinct in our lifetime. The mediterranean has already seen dramatic drops in fish numbers. Can boston really be immune?
Our trip offshore today can’t really make us feel good about the situation. Tuna normally jump out of the water which helps fishermen find them. We spent the entire day looking and didn’t see a single tuna. But thats not to say they weren’t just somewhere else. Heck, for all we know, the white sharks that were just spotted in the area might be driving them off. It kept us from swimming in the water.
Needless to say, this has been an adventure for our film crew. We want to thank Chris Borgatti and our captain Judd for making this trip happen. We’ll be back again soon!
