Bluefin Tuna Research Paper
The Secret Life of the Bluefin Tuna
The Atlantic Ocean is an underwater world connected to gulfs and seas where various species of fish swim. Just off the coast of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, it is the middle of April at the start of the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna breeding season. A female Bluefin returns to the same spawning grounds every year to lay eggs in the warm waters of the gulf. She is eight years old and it is her first breeding season. In the dead of night, she and her male partner will swim side by side as she lays 10+ million eggs, but these eggs have a slim chance of surviving. How slim? A one in 40 million chance of survival.
As one breeding season closes in the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of June, another breeding season …show more content…
If the Bluefin were to become extinct, two scenarios could happen. One scenario is that other predators might come in and eat everything that the Bluefin Tuna ate. A second scenario is that the fish the tuna ate would have less natural predators to worry about, resulting in a dramatic population growth. The fish that the tuna did not eat would deplete food sources resulting in a mass extinction of our aquatic ocean life. Imagine the oceans without any wildlife at all! This second scenario is becoming our reality every time a Bluefin Tuna is caught by humans.
Thankfully something is being done to help prevent this extinction. Organizations such as the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) has been tagging the Bluefin Tuna since 2008. The WWF has influenced decisions made by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) on regulating the fisheries in the Mediterranean Sea. The one thing humans can do is to limit the amount of tuna being fished and how the tuna are caught. There is only one way to keep the Bluefin Tuna from becoming extinct and that is to control our actions around their
The Atlantic Ocean is an underwater world connected to gulfs and seas where various species of fish swim. Just off the coast of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, it is the middle of April at the start of the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna breeding season. A female Bluefin returns to the same spawning grounds every year to lay eggs in the warm waters of the gulf. She is eight years old and it is her first breeding season. In the dead of night, she and her male partner will swim side by side as she lays 10+ million eggs, but these eggs have a slim chance of surviving. How slim? A one in 40 million chance of survival.
As one breeding season closes in the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of June, another breeding season …show more content…
If the Bluefin were to become extinct, two scenarios could happen. One scenario is that other predators might come in and eat everything that the Bluefin Tuna ate. A second scenario is that the fish the tuna ate would have less natural predators to worry about, resulting in a dramatic population growth. The fish that the tuna did not eat would deplete food sources resulting in a mass extinction of our aquatic ocean life. Imagine the oceans without any wildlife at all! This second scenario is becoming our reality every time a Bluefin Tuna is caught by humans.
Thankfully something is being done to help prevent this extinction. Organizations such as the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) has been tagging the Bluefin Tuna since 2008. The WWF has influenced decisions made by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) on regulating the fisheries in the Mediterranean Sea. The one thing humans can do is to limit the amount of tuna being fished and how the tuna are caught. There is only one way to keep the Bluefin Tuna from becoming extinct and that is to control our actions around their