Since the 1990s, massive use of drifting Fish Aggregating Devices (dFADs) to aggregate tropical tunas has strongly modified global purse-seine fisheries. For the first time, a large data set of GPS positions from buoys deployed by French purse-seiners to monitor dFADs is analysed to provide information on spatio-temporal patterns of dFAD use in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during 2007-2011. F...

Industrial tuna fisheries operate in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but concerns over sustainability and environmental impacts of these fisheries have resulted in increased scrutiny of how they are managed. An important but often overlooked factor in the success or failure of tuna fisheries management is the behaviour of fishers and fishing fleets. Uncertainty in how a fishing fleet w...

Length and age at maturity are important life history parameters for estimating spawning stock biomass and reproductive potential of fish stocks. Bias in estimates of size and age at maturity can arise when disparate distributions of mature and immature fish within a population are not accounted for in the analysis. Here we investigate the spatial and temporal variability in observed size and a...

Tuna are large pelagic fish whose populations are close to panmixia. In addition, they are threatened species, so it is important for the maintenance and monitoring of genetic diversity that genetic information at a genome level be obtained. Here we report the draft assembly of the southern bluefin tuna genome and the collection of genome-wide sequence data for five other tuna species. We sampl...

The movements of Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus thynnus) have captured the interest of scientists and fishers since the time of Aristotle. This tuna is unique among bony fish for maintaining elevated body temperatures (21 degrees C above ambient) and attaining large size (up to 750 kg). We describe here the use of a pop-off satellite tag, for investigating the Atlantic-wide movements an...

This paper represents a review of different tagging activities carried out on bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea. Except in Croatia where tagging has been done on captive specimens, all other tagging campaigns, performed within framework of joint European Tuna Tagging Programme, have been done on bluefin tuna released in the open sea. Besides the taggin...

Discoloration of dark-fleshed fish species during storage and processing was mainly due to the reaction of myoglobin, a monomeric globular heme protein contributed to the pigmentation of red meat fish, alone and with other muscle components. Metmyoglobin formation caused by the autooxidation of myoglobin was a major factor influencing the darkening of dark-fleshed fish meat during iced and froz...

BACKGROUND Birth size has been shown to be related to maternal fish intake, although the results are inconsistent. OBJECTIVE The objective was to assess the association of consumption of different types of fish and prenatal mercury exposure with birth weight, birth length, and classification as small for gestational age (SGA) in newborns. DESIGN Cord blood total mercury was measured in 554 ...

Fisheries have removed at least 50 million tons of tuna and other top-level predators from the Pacific Ocean pelagic ecosystem since 1950, leading to concerns about a catastrophic reduction in population biomass and the collapse of oceanic food chains. We analyzed all available data from Pacific tuna fisheries for 1950-2004 to provide comprehensive estimates of fishery impacts on population bio...

A comprehensive understanding of the reproductive biology and spawning activity of the tuna is necessary for sound management of this complex and important fishery. Current methods for assessing maturity schedules of tunas is based on the conventional approach of collecting gonads for detailed histological examination. While this method has proven to be accurate and provides valuable informatio...