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As the world''s love affair with raw fish depletes wild tuna populations, long-running
efforts to breed the deep-sea fish from egg to adulthood may finally be bearing
fruit, according to the Associated Press. Though the challenges are daunting,
the potential profits are huge. By the end of this year, an Australian company
says it will begin selling small amounts of southern bluefin tuna hatched in
its fishery. A Japanese firm breeding the more prized Pacific
bluefin tuna hopes to start sales in 2013 and ship 10,000 fish by 2015.
Whether tuna farming will become viable on a large scale remains an unanswered
question. Tuna are much harder to rear than the widely farmed salmon and
shrimp. They are large and need room to swim. They only spawn under certain
circumstances. In some experiments, less than 1 percent of the babies survive.
The bulk of the tuna farmed today isn''t bred from eggs; it is caught in the sea
and fattened on farms. Atlantic bluefin, found in the Atlantic
Ocean and the Mediterranean, is disappearing so rapidly that Monaco is
pushing to list it as an endangered species at an
international meeting in Qatar in March. The U.S. says it will back the
proposal. Wild tuna still commands a premium over farmed tuna. In January, a
200-kilogram Pacific bluefin tuna fetched a
record 20.2 million yen ($220,000) at a Japanese fish market. 40-kilogram
(90-pound) tuna raised at Maruha fetch about 100,000 yen ($1,100) each.
Japanese consume 80 percent of the world''s Atlantic and Pacific
bluefin tuna, the two species most sought after by sushi lovers.
