Costa Rica

A United States based world fisheries conservation association is gunning for punishment to be dished out, after a sportfishing boat was attacked by a commercial Venezuelan tuna purse seining boat and a helicopter off of Costa Rica’s coast.

This incident was reported, and is well documented, on The Billfish Foundation’s website: http://www.billfish.org.

The past August 1st, at just about 3PM, a United States sportfishing boat, the Silver-Rod-O, owned by Gary Carter, a TBF member, of Duluth, GA., was assaulted by the other craft, Venezuelan flagged tuna purse seiner La Rosa Mistica (The Mystic Rose), while minding its own business some 15 miles off the shores of Garza, Costa Rica.

According to Gary, the Silver-Rod-O was minding its own business, trolling around a school of spinner dolphin for yellow fin tuna and billfish, when a helicopter off of the La Rosa Mistica, began to circle overhead.

“We were celebrating one of our guest’s first-ever sailfish release, when the seiner veered from its course and headed directly toward our boat. The helicopter then began making passes over the anglers and as the seiner came closer and began setting its net, the helicopter started dropping incendiary devises around the Silver-Rod-O and the school of spinners.”

“Several explosives landed within 50 meters of the boat. The purse seiner continued to power straight toward our boat,” Carter said, “It was threatening to either encircle us in their net or to plow us into the sea unless we abandoned the school of dolphin. Rather than endanger our guests, we retreated and watched and listened as the La Rosa Mistica closed the net and its crew obnoxiously celebrated its victory.”

Just goes to show you, be careful where you fish! Hopefully, the Costa Rican authorities will look into the matter, and justice will be served.

Yellowfin tuna, Thunnus albacares

You like to think you’re doing the world a favor, and doing your part by making sure that can of tuna you pick up at the supermarket is “Dolphin Safe”, however, have you ever stopped to think what it might be doing to other sea life?

To properly understand the conundrum, we first need to look at the underlying history of “Dolphin
Safe” tuna.

The story goes something like this.. Way back when, a bunch of environmental activists got together and exposed those nasty tuna fisherman for the vermins they were. They were reeling in record amounts of tuna sure. But how did they find the tuna? Truth of the matter is, there are really only two ways to go about looking to tuna in the sea; rigorously searching using sonar, boats, and planes, or following around the dolphins.

No one really knows why, but dolphins tend to be associated with huge schools of tuna. So whenever a group of these tuna fishermen went out, they looked for pockets of dolphins and cast their lines.. It worked. They brought in record amounts of tuna, but they were also harming the dolphins.

We got all worked up about the poor dolphins, so the fishermen had to get creative. They now use floating objects on the ocean surface to attract the tuna, and then circle around them with a bunch of boats and reel in everything in the circle using seine nets.

Well surprise surprise… The dolphins are now safe, however any number of other species are now being caught as by-catch in bigger numbers than ever! You see, it seems that most sea faring creatures are drawn to these interesting floating things in the ocean, as they’ve never seen them before.. They go in to investigate, and BAM! They are stuck too!

So, did we REALLY do a favor by introducing “Dolphin-Safe” tuna? The dolphin isn’t endangered after all, but some of the other sea creatures being reeled in now are.. So we saved one species, but put another 100 or more at risk of extinction…

You can read a more extensive examination of the problem by visiting Southern Fried Science.