Bluefin tuna met all their criteria. Tunas have been a favorite food fish all over the world for over a thousand years. Bluefin tunas are particularly photogenic: big, sleek and handsomely contoured. Blue-fins were highly valued and demand for the fish was putting heavy pressure on the populations. And bluefins were certainly interesting. The fish grew to be over two meters long and could weigh well over 300 kilograms. They could attain swimming speeds of over 72 kilometers per hour and migrate over 6,000 miles in a year. Sexy? Streamlined, well muscled, warm blooded and distinctive, bluefin tunas were the ideal "poster child" for effective money appeals.

The fact that bluefin tuna were already being managed under regional conservation programmes did not really matter to the fund raising groups. They were confident that they could discredit the regional tuna management organizations with a strong propaganda campaign and convince the public that tunas were being mismanaged.

With grants from the Pew Charitable Trust, a $4.6 billion trust fund, the MacArthur Foundation, and other groups promoting the environmental agenda, they did just that. Spewing out millions of dollars worth of propaganda in newspaper ads, TV documentaries, press releases and direct mail appeals, organizations such as World Wildlife Fund, the Audubon Society, Greenpeace, the Center for Marine Conservation, and Earth Island Institute convinced the public that both the Atlantic bluefin tuna and the southern bluefin tuna were on the verge of extinction.

The environmental fund raising groups that are now feeding off the hysteria they created for bluefin tunas would like nothing better than to persuade CITES to list bluefins on Appendix I. A CITES listing would give credence to their allegations and justify their efforts. It also would provide them with another hook for their money appeals.

Arguments to list bluefin tunas on the CITES Appendices should be taken with a large grain of salt. For one thing, as mentioned earlier, the important stocks are already managed under sound conservation programs by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) and the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tunas (CCSBT). Both of these organizations are guided by some of the world's best tuna scientists and a wide range of experts with years of experience. They have adopted a number of measures which have brought the populations under control and provided for an increase in their numbers.

One of the tactics of the fund-raising groups is to point to declines in populations as evidence of a threat of extinction. Fish populations, however, are at their most productive when their unexploited populations are reduced by half. That is the level at which they produce the most young and is termed the maximum sustainable yield point.

Most fish have a high level of fecundity and can recover quickly from events that reduce their populations to a small fraction of their original size. A single female bluefin, for example, produces tens of millions of eggs at each spawning.