Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
l eets of many nations to its rather limited habitat in the northernmost Pacii c Ocean
centered on the Bering Sea. Most of the catch has been consumed as imitation
shrimp and crab meat (Japanese
surimi
). Pollock catches rose exponentially during
the 1960s and the early 1970s but peaked in 1986 at less than 7 Mt/year, and
by the beginning of the twentieth century they were below 3 Mt/year. Even so, they
are the world's second largest single-species i shery, surpassed only by catches of the
Peruvian anchovy (FAO 2011a).
As for the prices, Atlantic and Pacii c bluei n tuna
(Thunnus thynnus
and
T.
orientalis
, Japanese
maguro
) have led the way. The exploitation of these species
began with catches of small i sh for canning, but the market soon shifted to catching
large (maximum weight in excess of 600 kg) specimens for export to Japan, where
the meat is the highest-prized variety for sushi and sashimi. Japanese prices rose
from just over 10 cents/kg in the late 1960s to about $2.5/kg by 1975, to nearly
$30/kg for the fattiest i sh by the late 1980s; the record price paid for a giant i sh
was $213/kg in 1991 (Buck 1995). That record has been repeatedly surpassed, and
another large (232 kg) bluei n caught in Japanese waters was auctioned off for $775/
kg in January 2010 (Buerk 2010). Two years later even that price seemed modest,
as a 269-kg bluei n was sold in January 2012 for $ 2,737/kg (BBC News 2012).
