The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) will be investing close to €1.5m in two big research projects on Atlantic bluefin tuna.
It will be co-ordinated within two international consortia by AZTI-Tecnalia, an R&D centre specialising in marine and foodstuff research.
In the first project around 11,750 tuna will be tagged and released over the rest of this year with conventional tags, 40% with a double tag, a minimum of 50 internal archival electronic tags and 40 external pop-up electronic tags.
This work will be done in the Bay of Biscay, Straits of Gibraltar, Gulf of Lion and the Ionian Sea-Central Mediterranean. The project will be addressing important biological and ecological aspects and will be providing independent estimates of abundance and fishing mortality rates.
The second project on biological and genetic sampling of the Atlantic bluefin tuna will be used to find out about the population structure of the species, its migrations, mixing, growth and reproduction rates.
The two projects involve 23 organisations and research centres from different countries and amount to €1,080,000 and €430,000, respectively.
The ICCAT programme to research the bluefin tuna for the whole of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean (GBYP), which is the framework for the two projects, seeks to improve the understanding of key biological and ecological processes, gather basic data, and improve the evaluation models and scientific advice on the situation of the stock.
