Does fishing on drifting fish aggregation devices endanger the survival of tropical tuna?
Fishermen hold empirical knowledge that tuna aggregate under floating objects, such as lengths of old rope, pieces of wood, or even large marine mammals. There is still no full explanation for this aggregation behaviour, but the past 20 years have seen purse-seine fishery operators take advantage of the associated concentrations of fish. Fishermen cast off floating rafts equipped with buoys which act as FADs. An enormous purse-seine net, deployed in a wide arc on either side of the vessel, encircles the school of tuna that come to shelter under the FAD. The lower part of the net is tightened, enclosing the fish in a hemisphere large enough to entrap a mass of tuna. A sudden growth in the size of tropical tuna catches taken from under these artificial drifting objects was observed for the early 1990s. This was true especially for juveniles. Between 1996 and 2005 the average annual catch taken on FADs reached 1 115 000 tonnes, nearly a third of the global figure for tuna, all species con
