—The vulnerability of the highly mobile tunas (family Scombridae) and billfishes (families Istiophoridae and Xiphiidae) to various fishing gears and detection by aerial surveys is influenced by their depth distributions, travel speeds, residency times, and aggregation. As a result, understanding the effects of the physical environment on fish behavior is critical for robust population assessmen...

OBJECTIVE To report the case of a fisherman who developed chronic mercury poisoning due to excessive consumption of tuna while working on a pelagic fishing vessel. CASE REPORT A 48-year-old male deep-sea fisherman developed paresthesia and pain in both legs while working at sea. He continued working for over 4 months on a pelagic fishing vessel but was eventually unable to function normally a...

Although the spread of sushi restaurants in the European Union and United States is a relatively new phenomenon, they have rapidly become among the most popular food services globally. Recent studies indicate that they can be associated with very high levels (>70%) of fish species substitution. Based on indications that the European seafood retail sector may currently be under better control th...

The population of flesh-footed shearwaters (Puffinus carneipes) breeding on Lord Howe Island was shown to be declining from the 1970's to the early 2000's. This was attributed to destruction of breeding habitat and fisheries mortality in the Australian Eastern Tuna and Billfish Fishery. Recent evidence suggests these impacts have ceased; presumably leading to population recovery. We used Bayesi...

Knowledge of spawning behaviour and fecundity of fish is important for estimating the reproductive potential of a stock and for constructing appropriate statistical models for assessing sustainable catch levels. Estimates of length-based reproductive parameters are particularly important for determining potential annual fecundity as a function of fish size, but they are often difficult to estim...

Top pelagic predators such as tunas, sharks, marine turtles and mammals have historically been difficult to study due to their large body size and vast range over the oceanic habitat. In recent years the development of small microprocessor-based data storage tags that are surgically implanted or satellite-linked provide marine researchers a novel avenue for examining the movements, physiology a...

A more medial and anterior position of the red aerobic myotomal muscle (RM) and the presence of a vascular counter-current heat exchange system provide the functional elements that facilitate regional RM endothermy in tunas, lamnid sharks and the common thresher shark (Alopias vulpinus). The convergent RM morphology among all species capable of RM endothermy suggests that RM position is a stron...

A preliminary study on species composition of a Korean purse seine catch landed at cannery was conducted in April 2011. In the cannery, all tuna catch are sliding through a sorting grid panel that filters and drops fish in the buckets by size class (above 9 kg, 3.4-9 kg, 1.8-3.4 kg, 1.4-1.8 kg and below 1.4 kg). In cannery processing, species sorting was made for skipjack and yellowfin tuna onl...

Introduction Do billfish and tuna distinguish colours? This question has captivated both fishermen and scientists for years. Proving colour vision in this group of fish is particularly difficult since behavioural colour discrimination experiments—the “final proof” of colour vision ability in any animal—are impossible to undertake with such large open ocean fish. Instead, scientists have aimed t...

Recently we demonstrated that the capacity of isolated muscle mitochondria to produce reactive oxygen species, measured as H2O2 efflux, is temperature-sensitive in isolated muscle mitochondria of ectothermic fish and the rat, a representative endothermic mammal. However, at physiological temperatures (15° and 37°C for the fish and rat, respectively), the fraction of total mitochondrial electron...