Tuna
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| Illustrations after Secretariat of the Pacific Community, New Caledonia. |
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The ocean around us supports a variety of offshore fishes, such as masimasi (mahimahi), swordfish, wahoo and marlin, but by far the most commercially important of these pelagic fishes are the tunas. The most common in our local waters are albacore (apakoa), yellowfin (asiasi), skipjack (atu) and dogtooth tuna (tagi) .
Dogtooth tuna are occasionally seen near shore, but tuna prefer the open ocean and are wide-ranging species. These ultra-streamlined fish undertake impressive oceanic travels -- one skipjack was caught here that had been tagged near Australia over 2000 miles away. But the general movements of tuna in our area are not known.
Fishermen catch tuna in our area by trolling at FADs (fish aggregation devices), offshore seamounts, or wherever seabird flocks are feeding (the flocks indicate the presence of baitfish that the tuna are probably also feeding upon). In recent years, commercial catches of locally-caught tuna have increased in the longline fishery that targets albacore using long lengths (extending 5-40 miles) of monofilament longline with baited hooks.
Given that American Samoa has two major tuna canneries and we are the No. 1 port in the United States in terms of value of fish landed (about $200,000,000 of tuna per year), it is somewhat surprising to realize that few of the fish canned here are actually caught within American Samoa's waters. That's because tuna are not particularly abundant in our area, so local catches delivered to the canneries amount to less than 1% of the 200,000 tons of tuna processed at the canneries each year. Commercial quantities of tuna are generally located 1000s of miles away from American Samoa, so the big purse seiners and foreign longliners that you see docked in Pago Pago Harbor do not fish locally. Instead, they must travel for about 1 week just to reach their distant fishing grounds. The reason why these boats deliver their catch to the canneries here is simply because the tuna canned in American Samoa can enter US markets tariff-free as “Made in USA”, and the US is one of the largest consumers of tuna.
A rather enjoyable feature about tuna is that their meat generally lacks parasites, so people eat raw tuna in a variety of forms (oka, sashimi).
P. Craig, NPS