COOL Story !! Tagged Tuna --- 16 years later

By RICHARD SALIT
 
Journal Staff Writer


Message-in-a-bottle stories are always entertaining, but Rhode Island charter boat captain Al Anderson can now tell a fishy version that’s a heckuva of a tale.

Anderson, 75, has been taking people fishing out of Galilee for nearly half a century. For most of that time, he’s taken every opportunity available to tag and release fish — a practice he began even before regulatory agencies and scientists had organized sophisticated tagging systems to learn more about different species.

In fact, he started when he was a graduate student in fisheries biology at the University of Rhode Island.

“I’m a biologist by training,” says Anderson. “I value the resource. If I can catch the fish and let it go and further the resource, I’m all for it.”

He’s so devoted to the effort that he’s kept track of exactly how many fish he’s tagged in his long career.

“Get this,” he says. “I just exceeded 60,000.”

This is a story about just one of those fish.

In 1997, Anderson was working the Mudhole, a fishing spot southeast of Block Island. A man on his boat caught a very young bluefin tuna, weighing just 14 pounds. Anderson, of course, tagged it and returned it to the ocean.

As the years passed, bluefin tuna grew ever more valuable and ever scarcer while Anderson continued to take sport fisherman out to sea aboard his charter boat, the Prowler.

Then, about a month ago, a fisherman out of Nova Scotia was tending his longlines about 700 miles offshore when he hauled aboard quite a catch. It was a bluefin tuna weighing an estimated 1,200 pounds.

The fisherman quickly noticed it had a tag on it. While he took the prized tuna back to port to sell — the fatty fish can easily fetch tens of thousands of dollars on the sushi market — he reported the catch to the National Marine Fisheries Service’s voluntary tagging program.

Soon afterward, Anderson got a call from the agency. The fish was the very one he had tagged 16 years earlier. Only two other tagged fish in the program have been recaptured after so long. The federal agency, which says 270,000 fish have been tagged through the program, has put a spotlight on the remarkable story on its website and in news releases.

“It took me a little by surprise,” said Anderson, who was nevertheless very pleased.

The tags include such data as where and when the fish are caught, along with their length and weight. The information is especially helpful for migratory species, such as tuna, to further the understanding of their migratory routes.

Some newer high-tech tags are essentially flash drives that eventually detach from fish and transmit data via satellite about the temperature and depth of waters the fish inhabits.

Anderson once caught a tagged bluefin that showed it had swum from New Orleans to Rhode Island in just 10 days. Tagging, he said, proved long ago that tuna routinely swim from Europe to the United States. Fish he has tagged have been caught off Turkey and France.

Anderson says most recreational charter boat operators aren’t much interested in tagging fish or releasing them.

“They make fun of me,” he says.

But the people who return time and again to fish aboard the Prowler appreciate what he’s doing.

“I owe it all to my wonderful clients,” he says. “People who fish with me and have caught all of these fish, they favor my conservation ethic and work to help the future of the resource.”