Assignment - "The Tuna and the Dolphin"

The Tuna and the Dolphin

Nowadays, marine scientist have no idea why, but some of dolphins swim above, or “associate with” schools of mature yellow fin, skipjack, and big eye tuna.
Thus, to catch quantities of tuna, fisherman looks for the leaping dolphins and cast purse seines (nets pulled into a bag-like shape to enclose fish) around both tuna and dolphins. They found out that some of the dolphins are asphyxiated.

Perhaps the most important new technique is the “back down operation”. After “setting on dolphins” to catch tuna, that is, encircling both tuna and dolphins with the purse seine, the ship backs away, elongating the net, submerging the cork line in the back, and pulling the net out from under the dolphins.

According to many of the experts involved, including the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, the U.S National Marine Fisheries Service, and the scientific advisor to the American Tunaboat Association, the most efficient method for fishing tuna, in term s of operational, cost, yield and conservation of the tuna population, is to set on dolphins with a purse seine.
Many experts also believe that is not possible to abandon the practice to setting on dolphins without falling into other. While research to develop better techniques is now under way, positive result are not expected in the near future.

A U.S trade embargo was imposed in February 1991 on yellow-fin tuna caught by Mexican fleets in the eastern tropical pacific. This embargo resulted from violation of the Marine Mammal Act of 1972, which was amended in 1986 to prohibit the incidental kill of dolphins during commercial tuna fishing.
In fact, a National Marine Fisheries Service scientist has stated that I Mexico has money for research; it would be better invested on behalf of the Vaquita, a species in real danger of extinction, than in the tuna-dolphin issues since there is no danger to the dolphin population as a whole.
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Questions for Discussion

1. Why is there such a concern about dolphins?
2. What is your view of using the technologically most advanced country’s performance as a benchmark for evaluating other countries activities?
3. Is the denial of market access an appropriate tool to enforce a country’s environmental standards?
4. Is a zero-dolphin-death goal realistic?


Answer for the Question discussion

1. Because of many fishermen took an absolute advantage by using the nets which other side, use dolphins to catch large quantities of tuna fish. In fact, it decreased the population of dolphins.

2. I think in this country the technology is not fit the requirement yet. We can see the government does not really care about this problem. So there’s no measure that we can use. Indonesian’s technology is still under average and still can’t resemble other country’s technology. But that’s so important to realize that we cannot catch tuna-fish by using the Dolphins. That is very horrible.
In my opinion, we can use demarcation to border both of dolphins and tuna. Or in other alternative, I think we can use evacuation method for this case. We evacuate the dolphin to somewhere that safer, so that could avoiding unnecessary killing. And also we can issue the newest marine policy that explains the law of strict Dolphin’s catching. It could be another choice to decrease the dolphin’s death number.

3. The denial of market access such as embargo is not an appropriate way to enforce a country’s environmental standards. Like what U.S has done to Mexico.

4. A zero-dolphin-death goal is realistic but such effort needs to be done either by the fishermen or the government. In my opinion, the government should develop a new strategy to minimize the deaths of dolphins or the other words, decreasing unnecessary killing. Meanwhile, the fishermen should try to catch tunas in different location where dolphins’ population is rare.