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Posted on: January 5, 2010 4:04 PM, by Greg Laden
A tuna has been sold at auction in Tokyo's fish market for 16.28 million yen ($175,000, £109,000), the highest price paid in Japan for nine years.The bluefin tuna weighs 232 kg - nearly four times as much as the average Japanese man.
It was caught off the northern tip of Japan's main island of Honshu, in waters famed for high quality fish.
Mind boggling.
Whenever I see something like this I go and read the Guilty Planet blog for a while. Today I will eat salad garnished with tofu for lunch.
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Comments
I'd look up the reproductive cycle of that species of tuna first - the enormous ones may be beyond breeding age anyway. $1k per kg? $1 per gram? Screw that, I'll go for the assorted little fish (minus puffer fish) and make a bouillebaise.
Was the tuna tested for mercury content and PCBs?
That reminds me, I need to stock up on my tins of dolphin and tuna.
Posted by: MadScientist | January 5, 2010 4:31 PM
Just came from Guilty Planet where I discovered that seafood "isn't that healthy!" *major eye roll*
Posted by: mk | January 5, 2010 4:34 PM
If we all stop eating food of aquatic origin, how will that affect humanity's view of the value of seas, lakes, rivers? Will we then feel free to use them for dumping, drilling, mining, sewage disposal, hydropower, transportation, etc. with no concern for effects on the creatures which live there, because those creatures will have no commercial value?
Posted by: Jim Thomerson | January 5, 2010 4:36 PM
Enjoy your tofu, bean curd boy... that's all the more tuna for us.
Posted by: Bill James | January 5, 2010 4:56 PM
Shrimp off the boat in Corpus Christi is pretty affordable. ;-)
Posted by: Russell | January 5, 2010 5:34 PM
I caught several of these wonderful fish by handline off Martha's Vineyard many years ago (commercial fishing was my summer job). I was well paid, but nothing like this! (that's why I'm still working)
Posted by: Joemac53 | January 5, 2010 5:49 PM
Greg probably knows this, but I'll take the chance to point it out for the peanut gallery. The fish doesn't sell for $175k because it's worth that much. It sells for $175k because buying the first fish of the year is a huge advertising boon, and brings a lot of people to the restaurant that buys it to get a taste of the first tuna of the year. As I recall, last year two restaurants banded together to win the first fish auction so as to split the budget going into the "ad", and were planning on doing it again this year.
I'm not all that up on Japanese seafood auction prices, but last time I looked into it a similar fish would generally go for 10-20k. The first fish of the year always goes for an exorbitant amount, and every year bloggers make a huge deal about it while none of the news outlets point out that it's not a typical price and is basically a marketing gimmick that happens once a year.
Posted by: Paul | January 5, 2010 6:26 PM
You know, it would be nice if all that money being spent to save Ailuropoda would go to useful things going extinct, like Thunnus sp. and all those anurans going extinct. Maybe a little help for Borneo, which is being deforested to plant oil trees. I'm going have a quesadilla.
Posted by: Jared | January 5, 2010 6:38 PM
@mk: It certainly isn't healthy for the aquatic animal. :) There are aquatic mammals which can be eaten in addition to the fish, so it is in principle possible to avoid consuming any land-based animals.
Posted by: MadScientist | January 5, 2010 8:03 PM
PZ had a post about this last year called Destroying beauty because you can afford it. However, there appears to be a translation error going on in the media where "bluefin" is not qualified by its scientific name (there are three: Thunnus thynnus, T. orientalis, and T. macoyii), so people mistake the kind caught in Japan (which is at risk of being overfished) for the kind that is highly endangered in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. This, of course, does not say anything about the mercury levels in tuna. Please see the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation and the World Wildlife Foundation for more information about tuna.
Posted by: aratina cage | January 6, 2010 6:30 AM