When talking about health and eating habits, fish, as an alternative to other meats, comes up a lot. We all know tuna has good-for-you Omega 3S, but also an abundance of bad-for-you mercury. But for bluefin tuna in particular, there’s another compelling reason to consider ditching the stuff despite its (debatable) health benefits.
The World Wildlife Fund recently warned that Atlantic bluefin tuna will be wiped out completely by 2012 if we don’t halt the overfishing of it. Imagining a world without tuna fish in just three years is frightening to me. That grim prediction is certainly enough to make me never eat tuna again. Or at least for a while. I don’t believe that our eating habits, for health or other reasons, should ever cause the extinction of a species—period.
The WWF reports that the tuna population can only be saved if we halt fishing completely this May and June—which happens to be prime fishing season. Sergi Tudela of WWF said, “Bluefin tuna is collapsing as we speak and yet the fishery will kick off for business as usual. It is absurd and inexcusable to open a fishing season when stocks of the target species are collapsing.”
Behind the problem with bluefin tuna:
The WWF reports that the average size of a mature tuna has been halved since the 1990s along with an increase in demand. This has impacted the population of tuna immensely since bigger fish produce many more offspring than smaller ones.
What you can do to help the bluefin tuna problem
Stop eating tuna. At least for a while. If we can at least give the species a temporary rest from overfishing, they may not have to die off entirely at the hand of our eating habits.
