A 489-pound bluefin tuna sold at auction last year for a record $1.76 million. This year, a 507-pound bluefin at the same Japanese auction sold for just $70,000. Bluefin tuna are rapidly disappearing from the ocean, so why wasn't 2014's tuna even pricier? Has the slaughter of billions of tuna fish finally started to bore us?
Imminent extinction and insatiable demand apparently have no effect on the prize fish's price—it's the Punxsutawney Phil from a different phylum.
Imminent extinction? you ask, typing "micro restaurants" into OpenTable. They've been saying that since my first carpaccio.
According to a stock assessment released last year by the International Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific Ocean, the bluefin tuna population is at less than 4 percent of its unfished size.
"The population has effectively been decimated," said Amanda Nickson, director for global tuna conservation for The Pew Environment Group. "Over 90 percent of bluefin tuna are caught before they reach reproductive age. You have to wonder if this remotely sustainable."
Or wonder how delicious they are when their fat is rendered with a blowtorch.
Even if your $9 deli sushi box contained actual tuna (it doesn't) it would seem more prudent to get the Krab-Substance Roll.
